Interview Series 2010: Cherry Ice
Additional questions, as well as discussion is welcome in the comment section; however, the interviewed vidders are under no obligation to respond, or to respond in a timely manner. Any questions on additional interviews or the up-coming Meta Series can be directed to me at death_is_your_art (at) yahoo (dot) ca.
Vidding name: Cherry Ice
Vidding since: 2007
First vid and source: Devotion (Life on Mars)
Most recent vid and source: Glass (Watchmen), and Body of Years (Power Play)
Total number of vids to date: 19
Vid links: LJ tag, website
How did you get started? Were you taught by someone or did you start on your own?
Fannishly, I started out writing fic and making icons. Vidding was something that was on the periphery of my radar before thefourthvine started posting vid recs - I mainly related to it as 'that thing that many scary-smart, incredibly talented fans did'; her posts helped to introduce me to a variety of vids, vidding styles, and exposures. When I started mulling over giving it a shot myself, she and sprat were both incredibly encouraging and essentially told me to stop fretting incessantly and just DO it.
Theoretically, I started out vidding on my own, but laurashapiro and elynross both did extensive beta work with me, especially in my first year. They were instrumental in making me question why I was approaching material and storytelling in the way I did, what worked and what didn't, and their feedback was integral to my initial growth.
When did you realize that "Hey I enjoy this whole vidding thing, and I might be pretty decent at it"?
I have both realized and discarded these things multiple times over the last few years. My first few vids were like pulling badly compacted tooth with a string tied to a doorknob. The first vid that had a smooth birthing process was Only, a BSG video I did for VVC Challenges 2007. It was also the first video I finished with a real rush of satisfaction, and when I really realized that maybe I enjoyed it overall - up until then, I had very much considered myself to be too low on the learning curve to figure out whether I was reacting to vidding or the learning curve itself.
With respect to 'I might be pretty decent at it', I think that it is probably related to 'Only,' again, as it did rather well in The Fourth Wall awards that year - but the realization was not with that, but the fact that several people specifically suggested that I enter something into contention.
Of course, sometimes I still think that when I grow up, I shall be a Real Vidder.
Do different things tend to trigger your desire to make a vid, or does it tend to be something similar each time? What's your main source of inspiration?
Many different things have inspired me to vid - love for a source or character or even a specific episode, questions I want to pose regarding themes in canon, issues I want to raise regarding a source or connections I want to draw within it. Sometimes it is as simple as hearing a song that is perfect for a source or character. I suppose if I were to condense this down into one inspiration, it would be exploration - I am inspired by sources that give me room to explore the story or characters, or concepts I love or find problematic.
Once you have been inspired, what's the first aspect of a vid that comes to you? Is it the visuals of the source? The song edit? The colors? Something else?
As varied as the conception of my vids is, the construction itself tends to start with a single aspect: how the music itself moves. I'm synaesthetic with regards to music, which means for me, music itself moves, has motion and texture. The movement of the music is the scaffold I build my vids on, and it is important that I figure out how it relates to the movement (or lack there of) of my source, and how that source relates to the story I am trying to tell or idea I want to explore.
What factors contribute to the design decisions when creating titles for your vids? Are they determined just from qualities inherent to the source or are there outside influences?
Historically, a lot of my design decisions are motivated by what I think looks cool at the time. This is unfortunate because it has led to a number of titles sequences that in retrospect are nearly completely unreadable.
For example, Dark Room (Merlin, 2009) had text entering in overlay mode which gave it a nice rippling motion that I thought worked well with the instrumental song.
Unfortunately, I forgot that my screen is extra bright, and it became unreadable. Even more unfortunately, it was a VVC Premiere, and people who couldn't somehow check their program books in the dark had no idea who made it. Wheee!
I started out using white text on a black background for title cards because it was what everyone else was doing, and it gives good information - I'm not entirely sure why I stopped doing that, though it does pop up occasionally ( I'll Follow You Tonight, Shelter, 2010; The Day the Air Turned Blue, Fringe, 2010). I do however try to make the entrance something that matches the mood of the vid.
By and large, though, I try to make my titles something that relates to the vid itself: Body of Years with the overlay on the hockey rink, Glass with the position on the watch face, or Attention: Gotham City, where the titles flicker in and out like a pirate radio signal experiencing static. These are likely to be in Arial/Arial Black in a complementary colour (or another good solid font), with a basic fade, because the point of these is to compliment the images I am highlighting.
There are what I would consider to be two interesting exceptions: Ghosts (4) because the cards were actually a part of my conception of the vid.
The vid itself was an experiment in cutting and a fractured textbook of body parts, hence the question-style numbering and appearance at both the start and end. I also thought the first would help to set the tone.
Also, Mayday! (BSG, 2008), because I think the rippling 'Mayday' over the silent, wave-like shot of Boomer is integral to the vid itself.
What motivates the use of effects? Are they part of the pre-vid planning process, or are they decided upon when the vid is in-progress?
I suppose the first note on this question must be that I use very little in the way of effects - the majority of my vids are held together with twine and chewing gum, and that works just fine for me. My CVV vid this year was the first one I ever actually added motion to, and I was very proud of this.
For most of my vids, the entirely of my pre-planning process is some variation of "Huh, maybe I should make a vid." Be it: "Huh, Olivia is awesome. Maybe I should use that episode to make a vid about her," or "Huh, no one has done a Criminal Minds/Dexter crossover. Maybe I should make a vid that does that," or "Huh, Ten sure is a dick these days. Maybe I should make a vid about that." As such, the answer has to be that it's decided upon when the vid is in progress; however, I can usually tell by the texture of the music if I'm going to be using a lot of long overlays or cross dissolves or jump cutting, or something of the like.
What are the differences, if any, between editing live action and anime?
Thus far, the only animated source I've worked with is Avatar: The Last Airbender, so I can only speak as to difference I've noticed there, which is primarily in source movement. Not only have I found sections that are completely still (such as you rarely truly get in live action sources), the quality of the motion itself is different. There is no camera shake, and often less secondary motion. Much of what is in the source can be larger than found in live action. Movements are often smoother and more isolated, with a single point of motion occurring in the frame, and may occur much more suddenly. It can be both more static and more explosive.
What's your favorite part of vidding? What's fun about it for you?
The most fun part of the vidding process itself, is to me when finally lay down a series of clips on the timeline and they move just right, they hit the grace notes and crescendos in the music juuuuuust right. Of vidding in a larger context, it is the people I've met through it and the amazingly intelligent community it encompasses.
What has been your single most rewarding moment as a vidder?
I hope this doesn't make me sound too terribly self-centred, but: As nervous as I was about it, moderating a motion panel at VVC has to be up there. It was rewarding firstly because I pushed myself that far outside of my comfort zone and actually did it; secondly because I think there were some good conversations that came out of it, probably due to the quality of the participants. Of course, I was running out of time and had to cut discussion off, but I still think it was successful. Vidders are such a talented bunch, and if I managed to encourage anyone to spend a bit of time thinking about movement, or about the connection of motion and storytelling, that is pretty much awesome.
Which two or three of your vids would you point to as your most significant attempts to push yourself or try something new?
The most obvious one would, I think, be my Dexter/Criminal Minds crossover, Convenient Parking (2009). Crossover vids are a fair sight harder for me than crossover fics, and I attempted to not only unify the universes but also structure it as a case file/episode of Criminal Minds. Ghosts (4) (House, 2008) was one of the first times I really let myself experiment with my cutting, and I think of it almost as an anatomy lesson, pictures glimpsed from pages of a rapidly flipped medical textbook. What We Had (Doctor Who, 2008) because of the narrative. Oh, goodness, the narrative. I have a hard time with narrative.
There are a number of vids that I want to make that I haven't, because I'm just not certain I can pull them off. There's a Dexter one that would be an extreme challenge to me narratively (because, again, OH GOD, narrative), and an Ozymandias/Watchmen one that would use math, images from the comics, and external footage with varying aspect ratios. Aspect ratios are not my friend, either.
What's the biggest challenge you faced in the vid(s) you've made most recently?
This is a hard one, because I've had trouble with narrative, trouble with losing track of the lyrics that are supposed to be matching up, trouble with aspect ratios, and trouble knowing when to stop fiddling with things.
"Oh my goodness, you mean I have to have some sort of narrative or thematic through-line?" would be the easiest thing for me to say, but it is likely untrue. As ridiculous and self-centred as it may sound, however, my biggest challenge is myself. In reminding myself of the immortal words "There's nothing wrong with your vid, you're just freaking out." It's part of the reason I have trouble figuring out when things are done, and likely why I am oftentimes left with a vague dissatisfaction with my own work. Sometimes, just getting over myself can be the most difficult thing.
What two or three things about vids and vidding do you know now that you wish you'd known when you started?
Vidders are more scared of you than you are of them. Deinterlace your clips when you're clipping, not just in FCP. Not everyone is in your head and places clips in the same context as you do. Apparently, there's something wrong with my desktop's speakers that shifts beats. Listen to your music. I flatter myself that I was doing it instinctively on some level for a while, but really listening to your music makes a world of difference.
And above all, never forget to wear sunscreen.
Are there any types of vids that you won't vid and why? Along those same lines, is there a music genre you won't vid?
This is a question I am hesitant to answer, because I have no idea where I am heading or what I will be inspired by in the future. I think I'm less likely to vid large amounts of graphic sex - I'll Follow You Tonight (Shelter, 2010) included about 15 seconds of PG13 shirtless boys kissing whilst rolling about in crisp sheets, but I still giggled and blushed when I posted it.
With regards to music, my stock answer to that would have been Coldplay, but I have actually already done so! It was my third vid ( Don't Panic, Heroes, 2007) and I am just glad that even then, I knew enough to serve it up with a healthy side dish of irony. My next answer would have been that I am unlikely to do a lot of metal, but Nine Inch Nails are considered as such by some. I've vidded them twice, actually ( Only, BSG, 2007, and Ghosts (4)House, 2008). There's even a WIP of a Saul Williams remix floating around on my desktop. I am uncertain as to why this is - I don't even listen to NIN.
I like to think I cover a lot of ground, musically - folk, country, rock, hip hop, post rock, instrumentals, indie, experimental, dream pop - but I haven't vidded classical or non-North American world music yet, and I have recently realized I don't vid too much that's terribly danceable. I'd like to work on that.
To my great shame, I am also still harbouring the desire to vid some sort of fantasy series (preferably with fairies) to In the Hall of the Mountain King. I know how trite this would be, but Grieg is awesome.
Do you find that you vid differently for instrumentals? And do you find that they give you more or less room to be creative?
Interestingly enough, I actually hadn't realized just how much I vidded instrumentals until I received this interview. I suppose that says something in and of itself about how I approach vid construction and music as a whole. When I received this interview, a full quarter of my work was instrumentals (4 out of 16). After my VVC premieres, that number has dropped to 4 out of 19, but that's still 21%.
I find that working with instrumentals is liberating in a lot of ways. It frees you from the constraints imposed by lyrics, and the verse/chorus patterning, and gives more room to build structures within the music/motion interface.
On the other hand, it is also restrictive, because the lyrical scaffolding is not available to support your narrative. Your narrative has to be a lot more clear and concise because there is nothing to suggest meaning to the viewers other than the clips themselves.
Are there any themes or patterns that you've noticed in your body of work, or that other people have pointed out to you?
The word 'elliptical' has popped up a couple of times.
I think there's a thread of isolation running through a lot of my work - physical or emotional or mental. Isolation, disconnection, uncertainty. I hadn't actually noticed this until I was posed this question. Yay?
With respect to patterns, I tend to think of my vids as existing on a sort of two-dimensional Cartesian plane. The x-axis is storytelling, and it runs from connection-type vids, where I am drawing parallels, through to narrative vids, where I am telling some sort of story, to thesis vids, where I am making an argument of some sort. The y-axis is motion and movement, and runs from stylistic, where I have tried to make something visually engaging to integral, where it has become part of my storytelling. (There would usually be a 'chose not to use motion' option, but I don't really work like that.)
How would you describe your editing style as a whole?
Upon occasion, I hear 'elliptical' or 'organic' get tossed around. In all honestly, I'm not quite sure how to respond, as I only have one editing style and nothing to compare it to. Organic, perhaps? I often vid fairly linearly, but that's because I need to see the shape the vid is taking before I know where it's going. If I work in segments, not only do they get shifted around on the timeline so that they lose their alignments, I can't see the shape of the pieces of the vid, and I don't know if they'll fit together or the motion will match.
How do you feel about audience interpretation vs. original intention? Does it bother you if someone enjoys your vid, but while interpreting it in a way that you never intended or even considered? How big of a role should the audience play in defining a vid?
One of the things I love best about visual media is its intrinsic ambiguity. Unlike novels or audio media, where we can share point of view or stream of consciousness, we are external observers. When you remix, recut, and reinterpret you add further layers of ambiguity, and layer your own intentions, interpretations, and worldview on top of those already present in the media. If someone comes away with an enjoyment based on a completely different interpretation, I'm flattered that I managed to make them think about the material, story, or issues, or drew parallels that they could interpret thus.
I'm not saying that I think the author is dead or anything like that, but there's a reason the majority of my vid notes run along the lines of "Thanks to my betas!" A number of my videos are structured to raise questions rather than answer them. What does it take before you're considered a person? Is Camelot built upon untenable fault lines? If there's a war going on in Gotham City, who's fighting, and who's winning?
The exception to this is What We Had (Doctor Who, 2008), where I really wanted people to walk away going: "Man, Ten is sometimes kind of an ASSHOLE. Also, fuck you, RTD, for favouring some companions over others."
What do you find most useful in the beta process?
This is what doesn't work for me, and WHY. If there are suggestions about what might work better, that is also good!
Things that are not helpful: this was so awful it gave my face ANTHRAX.
It is also nice to know what works, because it makes me smile and gives me a reference for what does, and so I don't throw any babies out with my bath water.
How influential is a beta to the final result of a project?
This really depends upon the project. I know that it's a horribly, wishy-washy answer, but it's true. I have some vids that are virtually identical to their first drafts: Body of Years (Power Play, 2010), I'll Follow You Tonight (Shelter, 2010), Unsteady Ground (Merlin, 2009), Mayday! (BSG, 2008), Ghosts (4) (House, 2008), and Only (BSG, 2007). Then there are those that kicked my ass again and again and again, and betas have a much bigger hand in those.
The one that I always think of in this category is What We Had (Doctor Who, 2008), which I believe I've been quite open about obsessive24 kicking my butt over for MONTHS. (Thanks, hon!) Narrative is not my strong suit! This goes back to what I think makes a good beta - they tell you what doesn't work, and help you figure out why it's wrong, so you can fix it. Then, when you've fixed it a little more, and it's still wrong, they help you figure out what you bollocksed up that time.
Sometimes, it turns out that you and a beta are just on different wavelengths about a vid, and I think there has to be a relationship of trust and respect so that you can take the advice, step back and think about it, and decide if it's taking you where you want to go. I know that there've been times where I decided to stick to my guns, though more where the beta was right, and I was just clinging fiercely onto a piece of motion or shininess that looked lovely but didn't actually say anything.
Have you consistently used the same beta(s) and grown with each other, or have you changed over time to people specific to each project or each stage in your vidding history?
I've used a lot of the same betas, because my betas are awesome. Of course, I tend to jump around a lot fannishly, so that's given me a chance to work with a few new people (who are also awesome).
I do also have a bit of a problem in that I find it very difficult to ask people if they're willing to do me the huuuuuuge favour of betaing. I just don't like to impose. This is almost insurmountable with people who have never beta'd for me before. I know that we're all (semi) responsible adults, but I can't help but worry that I'm just bothering people.
Please name ONE vid that's had a formative influence on you as a vidder and tell us why. (Though there may be more than one that's had a formative influence on you as a vidder, for the purposes of this question you must only pick ONE)
This is an evil, evil question. There was a trifecta of vids that really showed me what vids could do, how they could move and the stories they could build, but because this is an evil, evil question, I am forced to go with merryish's Hello. The vid is such a rush, this building flow of continuous motion that plays off of every grace note and inflection. I've never actually been a SG/SGA viewer, but it built a world incredibly well and gave an immense sense of scope and place. It was such a visual and kinetic feast, and that's a method of engagement I think I've been trying to replicate.
Has there been ONE vidder who has influenced you more than any other? Why?
Again with the evil, evil questions! I'm going to have to go back to obsessive24 on this one, because I mean - have you seen the woman's back catalogue? It is both expansive and awesome. Change (in the house of flies) was one of the first vids that really showed me how different visual (comic and television) media could come together with music to build something so much greater than the sum of its parts. There's an incredibly flow to her work. One of a Kind has this remarkable steady thrum that flickers between smooth pulls and inevitable staggers, and was stuck in my head for months. Then there are things like New Dawn Fades, which is a remarkable and frightening character study that doesn't sacrifice visual interest or flow.
Red is the very definition of a classic vid, and Red Cliff incorporates motion into storytelling with unconscious grace. She covers so much ground with respect to fandom and intent that just watching her work makes me think about things in new ways.
Pretty much what I'm saying is that I wish she kicked puppies or something, because she's really just too remarkably good.
Whose current work do you find the most inspiring? Why?
Stupid, evil questions. I'm going to have to go with hollywoodgrrl, because there is something so consummately professional about everything she does. Seven (co-vidded with ohvienna, who is also awesome) feels almost like an art form in and of itself, like you should be watching it on display at a museum somewhere. Marble House is more than a vid about the Doctor and John Smith, it's an indictment of humanity and its wars and structured almost as outer space - it plays on The Knife's eerie sound and outside footage to create something that feels like it's made of white noise and cosmic microwave background radiation. Signed, the Doctor is one of the most original and breathtaking vids I've seen, weaving a narrative from disconnected bits and pieces.
hollywoodgrrl covers remarkable ground with an incredibly polished style, and builds magnificent ideas from the tiniest connections. I hear someone has a picture of her and obsessive24 kicking puppies together.
If you had to choose to BE any one of your vids, which would it be and why?
Tamacun! Because it is happy and peppy and jumpy and it makes me smile. Also, apparently everything else I make is about disconnection.
If all but one of your vids are erased from history, never to return (you can't reconstruct them, nor can you get anyone else to do it for you), which one would you keep and why?
What We Had, because as discussed above, that mother-lover kicked my butt around the block and back. It is not being erased from the universe that easily.
Is that your favourite of your vids? If not, what is, and why?
This is probably a cop-out answer, but I don't really have one. I have vids that I enjoy for one reason or another, but in general I tend to be left with a simmering dissatisfaction with my own work. Although, I suppose it would be more political to say that I love all my children equally.
If all but one of the vids that you've ever watched are erased from history, never to return, which one would you keep and why?
Lim's In Exchange For Your Tomorrows. I don't know if I can say anything about this vid that hasn't already been said. It really is a cinematic masterpiece - it creates something so new and engaging from the endlessly familiar, full of perfect movement and unexpected overlays and haunting images. It's the type of vid you show to non-vidders to explain just what some people can do, the depth of the stories they can weave.
Does it strike you that vidders tend to be more multifannish than the average fan? If so, why might this be?
Limited source. When vidding, you are restricted by the footage available to you. Yes, you can use external footage, and create crossovers (both of which I've done myself), but there is still the constraint of what the show or movie gives you to work with. With writing you can interpolate far out beyond canon - new heists or adventures, original villains or relationships. It's a lot more difficult to make a vid where Merlin and Morgana are 25th century accountants (IN SPACE) than to write it. There are also limitations imposed by what other vidders are doing - what clips are overused, what parallels have already been drawn. Also, I know I find reusing the same footage can get rather tedious.
Vidders also tend to produce work more slowly than writers, so I think vid watchers have to be more polyfannish to get their fannish fill.
Do you feel that there are factors about certain sources that tend to inhibit vids being made, or that would prevent you from making vids for them? For example, Glee is a show that provides various musical numbers. Does this change how vids are made or how many?
bananainpyjamas moderated a most excellent panel at VVC '10 about what makes source vidable, and I think the big take-away message from that was that these factors are different for everyone. For myself, personally, one of the biggest hurdles is sources that have large volumes of canon. I find it incredibly daunting to sort through multiple twenty-some episode seasons of an hour-long show. There is always the thought that there is a better clip out there in the source, but I can't locate it.
I do find that musicals, or shows whose score is very tightly tied to the source, or even sources that are tightly connection to a certain vid, can be difficult for me to even conceive of vidding. Once I have musical ties in my head, they're rather difficult to unknot. For instance, I want to do a Donnie Darko vid - it's three-quarter clipped and everything - but I can't seem to get past the fact that it's the Cat-Scan Hist'ry movie. Sometimes, I also find that someone has already made the vid I wanted to make -- bop_radar's DLZ (Terminator) even used the same song.
"The Day The Air Turned Blue" is gorgeous, and Olivia is awesome. What did you find most interesting or exciting about vidding her?
Aww, thank you anon! Olivia (and the fact that Fringe is gorgeously shot) are really the only things that keep me coming back to Fringe, because the 'science' has been known to quite literally make me whimper in pain and hide my eyes. Olivia is wickedly kickass without being unshakable, and endlessly clever. In TDtATB, what I found most compelling is that she has somehow found it in herself to keep working with Walter - the strength to deal every day with a man who performed experiments on her as a child. Despite that and the fact she has spent most of her life becoming the most competent person she knows, the thing that truly frightens her, that truly shakes her, is herself and what she's capable of.
How important is the presentation of a vid (where/when it is posted, the inclusion of banners, a catchy tagline/summary/quote) to you as both a vidder and a viewer?
As a viewer, the importance of presentation is largely dependent upon whether or not I am familiar with the vidder or source. If I know either, I'm more likely to check it out by default; if I know both, it's a fair certainty. A catchy tag will entice my interest, but an overly long one will often lose it - it feels awkward to me when people post extremely long notes or commentary in announcements. I'm probably not going to be too enticed if it has a fanfiction.net-style summary. When it comes to graphics - I'm not going to lie, a nice image is enticing, and gives me a good idea of what the vidder thinks the important bits of the vid are, but I'm not going to be too put off until it's something like this:
Where it's posted to me is important only in that it decides whether or not I'll find out about it, since I am often away from the interwebs for relatively long stretches of time and have a history of missing awesome vids when they're posted.
As a viewer with vidding experience, is there anything that tends to consistently put you off viewing a vid?
On the presentation side, anything with lot of apologies for quality. Look, we've all felt the need to apologize profusely for not being better (or maybe that's just me) but please keep it out of your notes and your announcement posts. It feels manipulative.
With regards to the vids themselves: long clips of people talk-y facing. Superfluous animated transitions and wipes in serious vids.
Have you noticed that the things you like about vids or that compel you to rec them have changed the longer you've been vidding?
I'm not going to lie - I'm a lot harder to please than I was when I started. When I started watching vids, every single thing about them was pretty much magic. OH MY GOD, LOOK AT ALL THE CLIPS STRUNG TOGETHER. Now, I tend to be drawn by more specific things - the way a story is woven together, parallels drawn that I hadn't considered, the flow or texture of a vid, the depth of a narrative.
Do you think that doing crossover vids is/may be easier than writing a crossover? Why or why not?
To me, crossover vids are several orders of magnitude harder than fic. I've done one crossover vid ( Convenient Parking, Dexter/Criminal Minds, 2009), and written a large number of crossovers - from Buffy/La Femme Nikita to Doctor Who/SGA to Alias/The Matrix. My very first fic ever written and posted was actually an X-Files/X-Men crossover. (For the record: yes, I was 14, and no, I don't want to talk about it.)
When writing a crossover, if you can write the characters from both fandoms, you're set. You come up with a premise as outlandish or realistic as you'd like, and you have the characters speak to and interact with each other. You can fill in enough backstory for people who are familiar with one or the other to make sense of the whole. If, say, you want to create a White Collar/Percy Jackson crossover wherein Kate is actually Annabeth, you say something along the lines of "LOL, Kate's a demigod," or have her mention wistfully that a long time ago, she wanted to be an architect. Not that I have multiple pages of that story written or anything, or any sort of lingering desire to try to figure out how on earth that story would work in prose or vid form.
When it comes to vidding, you are again limited by the extant source. Unless you are much more talented than I am, you cannot actually drop Dexter into the same frame as Garcia or Morgan. You have to create the impression of interaction by intercutting and shot selection, and it is much harder to buy into a crossover where no one actually talks to each other. In addition, you have to unify different shooting styles as well as the depth, tone, and saturation of the footage.
In which Morgan and Reid stalk follow Dexter to the beach and interrogate him:
Convenient Parking, 2009
With Convenient Parking, I was just lucky enough that the back of Doake's head looks an awful lot like the back of Morgan's head, if you cut it quickly enough.
This is all just an awfully protracted way of saying that to me, it's harder to visually unify sources and construct a coherent narrative from people who don't actually ever interact.
If you have remastered any of your vids, what tends to motivate the remastering of it? Do you think this process is similar to writers who revise early fic they've written?
I have not remastered a vid yet, though I have thought of it. This is mainly spurred by two factors - wonky source and aspect ratios from my early vids, and the fact that when I was young and dumb I neglected to save my source files. I've been pondering putting together a vid DVD, and I suspect I would need better files than I have. Personally, logos don't bother me much - they're not really something I notice when watching a vid, likely because they are static within the frame.
The reason I haven't remastered anything is first, that I have limited internet/vidding time and would prefer to spend it making new things, and second, that I think I would find it painful to force myself to retain all of those early timing errors. For some reason, I feel as if altering that would be a remake instead, and somehow cheating.
What are some options you'd think would be great to have in a vid archive?
The basics - streaming, embedding, statistics, comments. Ability to search by both vidder and fandom and see related works would make navigation easier. It would also be interesting to have a way to link the vid to commentaries such as those done in this community, or places it's been featured, such as con playlists or bradcpu's ridiculously awesome interview series. Ability to upload alternate audio tracks for commentaries would be neat.
What direction would you like to see your own vidding go in? What new things would you like to attempt in the future?
In general, I would like to improve my tech abilities and narrative capability, because I know those are areas in which I am relatively weak. Have I mentioned that I HATE NARRATIVE and how my vids are held together with chewing gum and baling twine? It works for me, but it doesn't mean that I couldn't get better. I'd really like to do more with outside footage and really just push myself to try out some of the things I don't think I can do.
At the end of the day, when it comes right down to it, my goal is simple: keep on making vids.
Vidding name: Cherry Ice
Vidding since: 2007
First vid and source: Devotion (Life on Mars)
Most recent vid and source: Glass (Watchmen), and Body of Years (Power Play)
Total number of vids to date: 19
Vid links: LJ tag, website
How did you get started? Were you taught by someone or did you start on your own?
Fannishly, I started out writing fic and making icons. Vidding was something that was on the periphery of my radar before thefourthvine started posting vid recs - I mainly related to it as 'that thing that many scary-smart, incredibly talented fans did'; her posts helped to introduce me to a variety of vids, vidding styles, and exposures. When I started mulling over giving it a shot myself, she and sprat were both incredibly encouraging and essentially told me to stop fretting incessantly and just DO it.
Theoretically, I started out vidding on my own, but laurashapiro and elynross both did extensive beta work with me, especially in my first year. They were instrumental in making me question why I was approaching material and storytelling in the way I did, what worked and what didn't, and their feedback was integral to my initial growth.
When did you realize that "Hey I enjoy this whole vidding thing, and I might be pretty decent at it"?
I have both realized and discarded these things multiple times over the last few years. My first few vids were like pulling badly compacted tooth with a string tied to a doorknob. The first vid that had a smooth birthing process was Only, a BSG video I did for VVC Challenges 2007. It was also the first video I finished with a real rush of satisfaction, and when I really realized that maybe I enjoyed it overall - up until then, I had very much considered myself to be too low on the learning curve to figure out whether I was reacting to vidding or the learning curve itself.
With respect to 'I might be pretty decent at it', I think that it is probably related to 'Only,' again, as it did rather well in The Fourth Wall awards that year - but the realization was not with that, but the fact that several people specifically suggested that I enter something into contention.
Of course, sometimes I still think that when I grow up, I shall be a Real Vidder.
Do different things tend to trigger your desire to make a vid, or does it tend to be something similar each time? What's your main source of inspiration?
Many different things have inspired me to vid - love for a source or character or even a specific episode, questions I want to pose regarding themes in canon, issues I want to raise regarding a source or connections I want to draw within it. Sometimes it is as simple as hearing a song that is perfect for a source or character. I suppose if I were to condense this down into one inspiration, it would be exploration - I am inspired by sources that give me room to explore the story or characters, or concepts I love or find problematic.
Once you have been inspired, what's the first aspect of a vid that comes to you? Is it the visuals of the source? The song edit? The colors? Something else?
As varied as the conception of my vids is, the construction itself tends to start with a single aspect: how the music itself moves. I'm synaesthetic with regards to music, which means for me, music itself moves, has motion and texture. The movement of the music is the scaffold I build my vids on, and it is important that I figure out how it relates to the movement (or lack there of) of my source, and how that source relates to the story I am trying to tell or idea I want to explore.
What factors contribute to the design decisions when creating titles for your vids? Are they determined just from qualities inherent to the source or are there outside influences?
Historically, a lot of my design decisions are motivated by what I think looks cool at the time. This is unfortunate because it has led to a number of titles sequences that in retrospect are nearly completely unreadable.
For example, Dark Room (Merlin, 2009) had text entering in overlay mode which gave it a nice rippling motion that I thought worked well with the instrumental song.
Unfortunately, I forgot that my screen is extra bright, and it became unreadable. Even more unfortunately, it was a VVC Premiere, and people who couldn't somehow check their program books in the dark had no idea who made it. Wheee!
I started out using white text on a black background for title cards because it was what everyone else was doing, and it gives good information - I'm not entirely sure why I stopped doing that, though it does pop up occasionally ( I'll Follow You Tonight, Shelter, 2010; The Day the Air Turned Blue, Fringe, 2010). I do however try to make the entrance something that matches the mood of the vid.
By and large, though, I try to make my titles something that relates to the vid itself: Body of Years with the overlay on the hockey rink, Glass with the position on the watch face, or Attention: Gotham City, where the titles flicker in and out like a pirate radio signal experiencing static. These are likely to be in Arial/Arial Black in a complementary colour (or another good solid font), with a basic fade, because the point of these is to compliment the images I am highlighting.
There are what I would consider to be two interesting exceptions: Ghosts (4) because the cards were actually a part of my conception of the vid.
The vid itself was an experiment in cutting and a fractured textbook of body parts, hence the question-style numbering and appearance at both the start and end. I also thought the first would help to set the tone.
Also, Mayday! (BSG, 2008), because I think the rippling 'Mayday' over the silent, wave-like shot of Boomer is integral to the vid itself.
What motivates the use of effects? Are they part of the pre-vid planning process, or are they decided upon when the vid is in-progress?
I suppose the first note on this question must be that I use very little in the way of effects - the majority of my vids are held together with twine and chewing gum, and that works just fine for me. My CVV vid this year was the first one I ever actually added motion to, and I was very proud of this.
For most of my vids, the entirely of my pre-planning process is some variation of "Huh, maybe I should make a vid." Be it: "Huh, Olivia is awesome. Maybe I should use that episode to make a vid about her," or "Huh, no one has done a Criminal Minds/Dexter crossover. Maybe I should make a vid that does that," or "Huh, Ten sure is a dick these days. Maybe I should make a vid about that." As such, the answer has to be that it's decided upon when the vid is in progress; however, I can usually tell by the texture of the music if I'm going to be using a lot of long overlays or cross dissolves or jump cutting, or something of the like.
What are the differences, if any, between editing live action and anime?
Thus far, the only animated source I've worked with is Avatar: The Last Airbender, so I can only speak as to difference I've noticed there, which is primarily in source movement. Not only have I found sections that are completely still (such as you rarely truly get in live action sources), the quality of the motion itself is different. There is no camera shake, and often less secondary motion. Much of what is in the source can be larger than found in live action. Movements are often smoother and more isolated, with a single point of motion occurring in the frame, and may occur much more suddenly. It can be both more static and more explosive.
What's your favorite part of vidding? What's fun about it for you?
The most fun part of the vidding process itself, is to me when finally lay down a series of clips on the timeline and they move just right, they hit the grace notes and crescendos in the music juuuuuust right. Of vidding in a larger context, it is the people I've met through it and the amazingly intelligent community it encompasses.
What has been your single most rewarding moment as a vidder?
I hope this doesn't make me sound too terribly self-centred, but: As nervous as I was about it, moderating a motion panel at VVC has to be up there. It was rewarding firstly because I pushed myself that far outside of my comfort zone and actually did it; secondly because I think there were some good conversations that came out of it, probably due to the quality of the participants. Of course, I was running out of time and had to cut discussion off, but I still think it was successful. Vidders are such a talented bunch, and if I managed to encourage anyone to spend a bit of time thinking about movement, or about the connection of motion and storytelling, that is pretty much awesome.
Which two or three of your vids would you point to as your most significant attempts to push yourself or try something new?
The most obvious one would, I think, be my Dexter/Criminal Minds crossover, Convenient Parking (2009). Crossover vids are a fair sight harder for me than crossover fics, and I attempted to not only unify the universes but also structure it as a case file/episode of Criminal Minds. Ghosts (4) (House, 2008) was one of the first times I really let myself experiment with my cutting, and I think of it almost as an anatomy lesson, pictures glimpsed from pages of a rapidly flipped medical textbook. What We Had (Doctor Who, 2008) because of the narrative. Oh, goodness, the narrative. I have a hard time with narrative.
There are a number of vids that I want to make that I haven't, because I'm just not certain I can pull them off. There's a Dexter one that would be an extreme challenge to me narratively (because, again, OH GOD, narrative), and an Ozymandias/Watchmen one that would use math, images from the comics, and external footage with varying aspect ratios. Aspect ratios are not my friend, either.
What's the biggest challenge you faced in the vid(s) you've made most recently?
This is a hard one, because I've had trouble with narrative, trouble with losing track of the lyrics that are supposed to be matching up, trouble with aspect ratios, and trouble knowing when to stop fiddling with things.
"Oh my goodness, you mean I have to have some sort of narrative or thematic through-line?" would be the easiest thing for me to say, but it is likely untrue. As ridiculous and self-centred as it may sound, however, my biggest challenge is myself. In reminding myself of the immortal words "There's nothing wrong with your vid, you're just freaking out." It's part of the reason I have trouble figuring out when things are done, and likely why I am oftentimes left with a vague dissatisfaction with my own work. Sometimes, just getting over myself can be the most difficult thing.
What two or three things about vids and vidding do you know now that you wish you'd known when you started?
Vidders are more scared of you than you are of them. Deinterlace your clips when you're clipping, not just in FCP. Not everyone is in your head and places clips in the same context as you do. Apparently, there's something wrong with my desktop's speakers that shifts beats. Listen to your music. I flatter myself that I was doing it instinctively on some level for a while, but really listening to your music makes a world of difference.
And above all, never forget to wear sunscreen.
Are there any types of vids that you won't vid and why? Along those same lines, is there a music genre you won't vid?
This is a question I am hesitant to answer, because I have no idea where I am heading or what I will be inspired by in the future. I think I'm less likely to vid large amounts of graphic sex - I'll Follow You Tonight (Shelter, 2010) included about 15 seconds of PG13 shirtless boys kissing whilst rolling about in crisp sheets, but I still giggled and blushed when I posted it.
With regards to music, my stock answer to that would have been Coldplay, but I have actually already done so! It was my third vid ( Don't Panic, Heroes, 2007) and I am just glad that even then, I knew enough to serve it up with a healthy side dish of irony. My next answer would have been that I am unlikely to do a lot of metal, but Nine Inch Nails are considered as such by some. I've vidded them twice, actually ( Only, BSG, 2007, and Ghosts (4)House, 2008). There's even a WIP of a Saul Williams remix floating around on my desktop. I am uncertain as to why this is - I don't even listen to NIN.
I like to think I cover a lot of ground, musically - folk, country, rock, hip hop, post rock, instrumentals, indie, experimental, dream pop - but I haven't vidded classical or non-North American world music yet, and I have recently realized I don't vid too much that's terribly danceable. I'd like to work on that.
To my great shame, I am also still harbouring the desire to vid some sort of fantasy series (preferably with fairies) to In the Hall of the Mountain King. I know how trite this would be, but Grieg is awesome.
Do you find that you vid differently for instrumentals? And do you find that they give you more or less room to be creative?
Interestingly enough, I actually hadn't realized just how much I vidded instrumentals until I received this interview. I suppose that says something in and of itself about how I approach vid construction and music as a whole. When I received this interview, a full quarter of my work was instrumentals (4 out of 16). After my VVC premieres, that number has dropped to 4 out of 19, but that's still 21%.
I find that working with instrumentals is liberating in a lot of ways. It frees you from the constraints imposed by lyrics, and the verse/chorus patterning, and gives more room to build structures within the music/motion interface.
On the other hand, it is also restrictive, because the lyrical scaffolding is not available to support your narrative. Your narrative has to be a lot more clear and concise because there is nothing to suggest meaning to the viewers other than the clips themselves.
Are there any themes or patterns that you've noticed in your body of work, or that other people have pointed out to you?
The word 'elliptical' has popped up a couple of times.
I think there's a thread of isolation running through a lot of my work - physical or emotional or mental. Isolation, disconnection, uncertainty. I hadn't actually noticed this until I was posed this question. Yay?
With respect to patterns, I tend to think of my vids as existing on a sort of two-dimensional Cartesian plane. The x-axis is storytelling, and it runs from connection-type vids, where I am drawing parallels, through to narrative vids, where I am telling some sort of story, to thesis vids, where I am making an argument of some sort. The y-axis is motion and movement, and runs from stylistic, where I have tried to make something visually engaging to integral, where it has become part of my storytelling. (There would usually be a 'chose not to use motion' option, but I don't really work like that.)
How would you describe your editing style as a whole?
Upon occasion, I hear 'elliptical' or 'organic' get tossed around. In all honestly, I'm not quite sure how to respond, as I only have one editing style and nothing to compare it to. Organic, perhaps? I often vid fairly linearly, but that's because I need to see the shape the vid is taking before I know where it's going. If I work in segments, not only do they get shifted around on the timeline so that they lose their alignments, I can't see the shape of the pieces of the vid, and I don't know if they'll fit together or the motion will match.
How do you feel about audience interpretation vs. original intention? Does it bother you if someone enjoys your vid, but while interpreting it in a way that you never intended or even considered? How big of a role should the audience play in defining a vid?
One of the things I love best about visual media is its intrinsic ambiguity. Unlike novels or audio media, where we can share point of view or stream of consciousness, we are external observers. When you remix, recut, and reinterpret you add further layers of ambiguity, and layer your own intentions, interpretations, and worldview on top of those already present in the media. If someone comes away with an enjoyment based on a completely different interpretation, I'm flattered that I managed to make them think about the material, story, or issues, or drew parallels that they could interpret thus.
I'm not saying that I think the author is dead or anything like that, but there's a reason the majority of my vid notes run along the lines of "Thanks to my betas!" A number of my videos are structured to raise questions rather than answer them. What does it take before you're considered a person? Is Camelot built upon untenable fault lines? If there's a war going on in Gotham City, who's fighting, and who's winning?
The exception to this is What We Had (Doctor Who, 2008), where I really wanted people to walk away going: "Man, Ten is sometimes kind of an ASSHOLE. Also, fuck you, RTD, for favouring some companions over others."
What do you find most useful in the beta process?
This is what doesn't work for me, and WHY. If there are suggestions about what might work better, that is also good!
Things that are not helpful: this was so awful it gave my face ANTHRAX.
It is also nice to know what works, because it makes me smile and gives me a reference for what does, and so I don't throw any babies out with my bath water.
How influential is a beta to the final result of a project?
This really depends upon the project. I know that it's a horribly, wishy-washy answer, but it's true. I have some vids that are virtually identical to their first drafts: Body of Years (Power Play, 2010), I'll Follow You Tonight (Shelter, 2010), Unsteady Ground (Merlin, 2009), Mayday! (BSG, 2008), Ghosts (4) (House, 2008), and Only (BSG, 2007). Then there are those that kicked my ass again and again and again, and betas have a much bigger hand in those.
The one that I always think of in this category is What We Had (Doctor Who, 2008), which I believe I've been quite open about obsessive24 kicking my butt over for MONTHS. (Thanks, hon!) Narrative is not my strong suit! This goes back to what I think makes a good beta - they tell you what doesn't work, and help you figure out why it's wrong, so you can fix it. Then, when you've fixed it a little more, and it's still wrong, they help you figure out what you bollocksed up that time.
Sometimes, it turns out that you and a beta are just on different wavelengths about a vid, and I think there has to be a relationship of trust and respect so that you can take the advice, step back and think about it, and decide if it's taking you where you want to go. I know that there've been times where I decided to stick to my guns, though more where the beta was right, and I was just clinging fiercely onto a piece of motion or shininess that looked lovely but didn't actually say anything.
Have you consistently used the same beta(s) and grown with each other, or have you changed over time to people specific to each project or each stage in your vidding history?
I've used a lot of the same betas, because my betas are awesome. Of course, I tend to jump around a lot fannishly, so that's given me a chance to work with a few new people (who are also awesome).
I do also have a bit of a problem in that I find it very difficult to ask people if they're willing to do me the huuuuuuge favour of betaing. I just don't like to impose. This is almost insurmountable with people who have never beta'd for me before. I know that we're all (semi) responsible adults, but I can't help but worry that I'm just bothering people.
Please name ONE vid that's had a formative influence on you as a vidder and tell us why. (Though there may be more than one that's had a formative influence on you as a vidder, for the purposes of this question you must only pick ONE)
This is an evil, evil question. There was a trifecta of vids that really showed me what vids could do, how they could move and the stories they could build, but because this is an evil, evil question, I am forced to go with merryish's Hello. The vid is such a rush, this building flow of continuous motion that plays off of every grace note and inflection. I've never actually been a SG/SGA viewer, but it built a world incredibly well and gave an immense sense of scope and place. It was such a visual and kinetic feast, and that's a method of engagement I think I've been trying to replicate.
Has there been ONE vidder who has influenced you more than any other? Why?
Again with the evil, evil questions! I'm going to have to go back to obsessive24 on this one, because I mean - have you seen the woman's back catalogue? It is both expansive and awesome. Change (in the house of flies) was one of the first vids that really showed me how different visual (comic and television) media could come together with music to build something so much greater than the sum of its parts. There's an incredibly flow to her work. One of a Kind has this remarkable steady thrum that flickers between smooth pulls and inevitable staggers, and was stuck in my head for months. Then there are things like New Dawn Fades, which is a remarkable and frightening character study that doesn't sacrifice visual interest or flow.
Red is the very definition of a classic vid, and Red Cliff incorporates motion into storytelling with unconscious grace. She covers so much ground with respect to fandom and intent that just watching her work makes me think about things in new ways.
Pretty much what I'm saying is that I wish she kicked puppies or something, because she's really just too remarkably good.
Whose current work do you find the most inspiring? Why?
Stupid, evil questions. I'm going to have to go with hollywoodgrrl, because there is something so consummately professional about everything she does. Seven (co-vidded with ohvienna, who is also awesome) feels almost like an art form in and of itself, like you should be watching it on display at a museum somewhere. Marble House is more than a vid about the Doctor and John Smith, it's an indictment of humanity and its wars and structured almost as outer space - it plays on The Knife's eerie sound and outside footage to create something that feels like it's made of white noise and cosmic microwave background radiation. Signed, the Doctor is one of the most original and breathtaking vids I've seen, weaving a narrative from disconnected bits and pieces.
hollywoodgrrl covers remarkable ground with an incredibly polished style, and builds magnificent ideas from the tiniest connections. I hear someone has a picture of her and obsessive24 kicking puppies together.
If you had to choose to BE any one of your vids, which would it be and why?
Tamacun! Because it is happy and peppy and jumpy and it makes me smile. Also, apparently everything else I make is about disconnection.
If all but one of your vids are erased from history, never to return (you can't reconstruct them, nor can you get anyone else to do it for you), which one would you keep and why?
What We Had, because as discussed above, that mother-lover kicked my butt around the block and back. It is not being erased from the universe that easily.
Is that your favourite of your vids? If not, what is, and why?
This is probably a cop-out answer, but I don't really have one. I have vids that I enjoy for one reason or another, but in general I tend to be left with a simmering dissatisfaction with my own work. Although, I suppose it would be more political to say that I love all my children equally.
If all but one of the vids that you've ever watched are erased from history, never to return, which one would you keep and why?
Lim's In Exchange For Your Tomorrows. I don't know if I can say anything about this vid that hasn't already been said. It really is a cinematic masterpiece - it creates something so new and engaging from the endlessly familiar, full of perfect movement and unexpected overlays and haunting images. It's the type of vid you show to non-vidders to explain just what some people can do, the depth of the stories they can weave.
Does it strike you that vidders tend to be more multifannish than the average fan? If so, why might this be?
Limited source. When vidding, you are restricted by the footage available to you. Yes, you can use external footage, and create crossovers (both of which I've done myself), but there is still the constraint of what the show or movie gives you to work with. With writing you can interpolate far out beyond canon - new heists or adventures, original villains or relationships. It's a lot more difficult to make a vid where Merlin and Morgana are 25th century accountants (IN SPACE) than to write it. There are also limitations imposed by what other vidders are doing - what clips are overused, what parallels have already been drawn. Also, I know I find reusing the same footage can get rather tedious.
Vidders also tend to produce work more slowly than writers, so I think vid watchers have to be more polyfannish to get their fannish fill.
Do you feel that there are factors about certain sources that tend to inhibit vids being made, or that would prevent you from making vids for them? For example, Glee is a show that provides various musical numbers. Does this change how vids are made or how many?
bananainpyjamas moderated a most excellent panel at VVC '10 about what makes source vidable, and I think the big take-away message from that was that these factors are different for everyone. For myself, personally, one of the biggest hurdles is sources that have large volumes of canon. I find it incredibly daunting to sort through multiple twenty-some episode seasons of an hour-long show. There is always the thought that there is a better clip out there in the source, but I can't locate it.
I do find that musicals, or shows whose score is very tightly tied to the source, or even sources that are tightly connection to a certain vid, can be difficult for me to even conceive of vidding. Once I have musical ties in my head, they're rather difficult to unknot. For instance, I want to do a Donnie Darko vid - it's three-quarter clipped and everything - but I can't seem to get past the fact that it's the Cat-Scan Hist'ry movie. Sometimes, I also find that someone has already made the vid I wanted to make -- bop_radar's DLZ (Terminator) even used the same song.
"The Day The Air Turned Blue" is gorgeous, and Olivia is awesome. What did you find most interesting or exciting about vidding her?
Aww, thank you anon! Olivia (and the fact that Fringe is gorgeously shot) are really the only things that keep me coming back to Fringe, because the 'science' has been known to quite literally make me whimper in pain and hide my eyes. Olivia is wickedly kickass without being unshakable, and endlessly clever. In TDtATB, what I found most compelling is that she has somehow found it in herself to keep working with Walter - the strength to deal every day with a man who performed experiments on her as a child. Despite that and the fact she has spent most of her life becoming the most competent person she knows, the thing that truly frightens her, that truly shakes her, is herself and what she's capable of.
How important is the presentation of a vid (where/when it is posted, the inclusion of banners, a catchy tagline/summary/quote) to you as both a vidder and a viewer?
As a viewer, the importance of presentation is largely dependent upon whether or not I am familiar with the vidder or source. If I know either, I'm more likely to check it out by default; if I know both, it's a fair certainty. A catchy tag will entice my interest, but an overly long one will often lose it - it feels awkward to me when people post extremely long notes or commentary in announcements. I'm probably not going to be too enticed if it has a fanfiction.net-style summary. When it comes to graphics - I'm not going to lie, a nice image is enticing, and gives me a good idea of what the vidder thinks the important bits of the vid are, but I'm not going to be too put off until it's something like this:
Where it's posted to me is important only in that it decides whether or not I'll find out about it, since I am often away from the interwebs for relatively long stretches of time and have a history of missing awesome vids when they're posted.
As a viewer with vidding experience, is there anything that tends to consistently put you off viewing a vid?
On the presentation side, anything with lot of apologies for quality. Look, we've all felt the need to apologize profusely for not being better (or maybe that's just me) but please keep it out of your notes and your announcement posts. It feels manipulative.
With regards to the vids themselves: long clips of people talk-y facing. Superfluous animated transitions and wipes in serious vids.
Have you noticed that the things you like about vids or that compel you to rec them have changed the longer you've been vidding?
I'm not going to lie - I'm a lot harder to please than I was when I started. When I started watching vids, every single thing about them was pretty much magic. OH MY GOD, LOOK AT ALL THE CLIPS STRUNG TOGETHER. Now, I tend to be drawn by more specific things - the way a story is woven together, parallels drawn that I hadn't considered, the flow or texture of a vid, the depth of a narrative.
Do you think that doing crossover vids is/may be easier than writing a crossover? Why or why not?
To me, crossover vids are several orders of magnitude harder than fic. I've done one crossover vid ( Convenient Parking, Dexter/Criminal Minds, 2009), and written a large number of crossovers - from Buffy/La Femme Nikita to Doctor Who/SGA to Alias/The Matrix. My very first fic ever written and posted was actually an X-Files/X-Men crossover. (For the record: yes, I was 14, and no, I don't want to talk about it.)
When writing a crossover, if you can write the characters from both fandoms, you're set. You come up with a premise as outlandish or realistic as you'd like, and you have the characters speak to and interact with each other. You can fill in enough backstory for people who are familiar with one or the other to make sense of the whole. If, say, you want to create a White Collar/Percy Jackson crossover wherein Kate is actually Annabeth, you say something along the lines of "LOL, Kate's a demigod," or have her mention wistfully that a long time ago, she wanted to be an architect. Not that I have multiple pages of that story written or anything, or any sort of lingering desire to try to figure out how on earth that story would work in prose or vid form.
When it comes to vidding, you are again limited by the extant source. Unless you are much more talented than I am, you cannot actually drop Dexter into the same frame as Garcia or Morgan. You have to create the impression of interaction by intercutting and shot selection, and it is much harder to buy into a crossover where no one actually talks to each other. In addition, you have to unify different shooting styles as well as the depth, tone, and saturation of the footage.
In which Morgan and Reid stalk follow Dexter to the beach and interrogate him:
Convenient Parking, 2009
With Convenient Parking, I was just lucky enough that the back of Doake's head looks an awful lot like the back of Morgan's head, if you cut it quickly enough.
This is all just an awfully protracted way of saying that to me, it's harder to visually unify sources and construct a coherent narrative from people who don't actually ever interact.
If you have remastered any of your vids, what tends to motivate the remastering of it? Do you think this process is similar to writers who revise early fic they've written?
I have not remastered a vid yet, though I have thought of it. This is mainly spurred by two factors - wonky source and aspect ratios from my early vids, and the fact that when I was young and dumb I neglected to save my source files. I've been pondering putting together a vid DVD, and I suspect I would need better files than I have. Personally, logos don't bother me much - they're not really something I notice when watching a vid, likely because they are static within the frame.
The reason I haven't remastered anything is first, that I have limited internet/vidding time and would prefer to spend it making new things, and second, that I think I would find it painful to force myself to retain all of those early timing errors. For some reason, I feel as if altering that would be a remake instead, and somehow cheating.
What are some options you'd think would be great to have in a vid archive?
The basics - streaming, embedding, statistics, comments. Ability to search by both vidder and fandom and see related works would make navigation easier. It would also be interesting to have a way to link the vid to commentaries such as those done in this community, or places it's been featured, such as con playlists or bradcpu's ridiculously awesome interview series. Ability to upload alternate audio tracks for commentaries would be neat.
What direction would you like to see your own vidding go in? What new things would you like to attempt in the future?
In general, I would like to improve my tech abilities and narrative capability, because I know those are areas in which I am relatively weak. Have I mentioned that I HATE NARRATIVE and how my vids are held together with chewing gum and baling twine? It works for me, but it doesn't mean that I couldn't get better. I'd really like to do more with outside footage and really just push myself to try out some of the things I don't think I can do.
At the end of the day, when it comes right down to it, my goal is simple: keep on making vids.