Vidding 101 fun

[marycrawford]

Now that I'm toying with Adobe Premiere, trying to make an actual Hercules & Iolaus songvid without blowing my head up in the process, I've begun paying attention to what transitions were used between shots in Hercules: the Legendary Journeys itself.

Maybe I'm unusual, but I don't think I ever even noticed whether a show or movie used straight cuts, dissolves, wipes or any of a host of special effects. Now I still don't notice half the time, but sometimes I do.

As far as I can tell, H:tLJ is mostly straight cuts (cutting directly from one image to another) with the occasional dissolve (fading one image into another) and fade-to-black for commercials. But occasionally they use wipes (one image moving horizontally across the other, almost 'bumping' it out of the way), mostly for comic effect. There's one that struck me particularly: in Mother of All Monsters, they use a tentacle wipe. One of Echidna's tentacles whips across the scene and 'wipes' it out, then we go back to Echidna. Unbelievable that I never noticed that. I suppose it's the cheesiest thing, but hey, I laughed.

I've seen a bit of discussion about special effect transitions in songvids. Since Premiere and other video editing programs come with a whole bunch of options, apparently some people think it's a waste not to use them all, whereas others say you should stick to straight cuts unless you really know what you're doing.

For me, it's easy: I'm sticking to straight cuts and the occasional dissolve because I don't know how to do any of the other things yet anyway. *g*

Argh. I wanted to compare and contrast two Xena/Hercverse vids here, one ('She Bangs') an example of a Xena vid that I liked, but that would have worked even better for me without many of the fancy transitions, and the other ('Discotheque' by Matt Savelkoul) a terrific Xena-Herc-Twankey-everybody comedy vid that doesn't seem to use any special transition effects at all. But I can't find either of them. Matt's vids seem to have been deleted, and I don't know who made 'She Bangs' (why oh why do so few vids have credits?). Has there been a purge in Xena fandom or something?

ETA: Thanks to Cortese, I now know that 'She Bangs' can be found here and that it's by JJ and the Video Vixen. Download and unzip; you'll need RealPlayer to watch it.

I like this vid because it zips and bounds along, uses great action shots timed well to the music, and the portrait of Xena is both affectionate and funny. (I particularly like the shot of Xena kissing Ares, then grabbing him by the family jewels to 'A woman's got one thing on her mind'.) But yeah, the transitions don't work for me at all, even though I can see that they're cleverly done; there's the shot scattering into pieces as Xena's fist hits, the three-dimensional wipe thing as Xena moves from trying to kill Hercules to kissing him, and so on. But all they do is distract me from the vid itself.

There's one effect I like, though, which is the split screen to 'thinking of her in her leather and lace' which shows a pan upwards of Xena dressing in her usual garb on the left, and a similar shot of her Miss Amphipolis guise on the right.

Comments

[tanacawyr.livejournal.com]

"She Bangs" is by JJ and the Video Vixen. It's a favorite of mine -- I think you can find it at www.iwantmyxtv.com/.

[marycrawford.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I kept Googling and coming up with another 'She Bangs' focusing on Gabrielle, but I couldn't find this one.

[halimede.livejournal.com]

Ooh, I love looking at technical details. There's that scene in (can't remember name of) Buffy episode where Buffy blows up the judge with a rocket-launcher, and *it* doesn't know what that thing on Buffy's shoulder does, but Angel and Drusilla get it alright, and the jump over the railing of the balcony. I *love* playing it frame by frame and seeing where they switch from actors to stunt doubles and back. I'm only sometimes aware of editing and I don't know the technical name for the different types of cuts anyway, but yeah. Cool. :)

[marycrawford.livejournal.com]

I've started to look at things like that, too, which is another first for me. Frex, in the H:tLJ episode 'Encounter' I think it was, I suddenly noticed that there was no cut between the typical 'Herc hits guy really hard' shot and the 'guy goes flying, lands on roof' shot - that the camera just moves from Herc to the guy flying away in one continuous shot. And then I listened to the commentary for that ep and yes, they were trying out some kind of new stunt rig there. Fun stuff.

I'm not sure I'm using the right terms for the different types of cuts, BTW, so don't take my word for anything. *g*

[falzalot.livejournal.com]

Before I even ~think~ about downloading this, please tell me it's not that gawdawful Am. Idol version of the song...

[marycrawford.livejournal.com]

I know not of American Idol, but this definitely sounds like it's Ricky Martin singing. *g*

[falzalot.livejournal.com]

whew!!!

And if you haven't heard William Hung's version of 'She Bangs', count your blessings. Trust me. It's ~painfully~ bad, but since the guy is local, it's hard to avoid it.

So do you have the other vid with da Twanky? Twanky is my hero(ine)!!

[mattmn.livejournal.com]

I was being self important and google-ing my name and I came across your LJ. I'm the Matt you mentioned and I made the Discotheque video :D

[marycrawford.livejournal.com]

Dude! Hey! *g*

I was googling you too, because I was hoping to find a webpage with your vids on. 'Discotheque' is the only one I've seen, and it's awesome. Please tell me - are you perhaps distributing them on DVD, or have you removed them altogether for legal reasons, or what? Eager vid fans want to know. :-)

Since you're here, I'd like to give you a bit more feedback about 'Discotheque'. I was wrong about it having no special transition effects - it does have that one multiple split screen effect. (Which wasn't my favorite bit, but not as annoying as the SFX in 'She Bangs'.)

I love what you've done with all the circular motion in the early part of the vid - the wheel spinning, the released gods whirling, etc. Great timing of clips to moments: I laughed out loud at Herc and Alternate!Nebula to 'You're confused' and at the Joxer (or is it Jace) headturn to 'Ahhh'. I also like the 'quiet' stretches in the vid with ethereal shots of Gabrielle and Twankey descending.

Two other bits I liked particularly:
- the clever sequence where you continue the motion from a clip of Twankey spinning her umbrella to Xena drawing a scarf through her hands to Aphrodite dancing, that was really well done.
- the sequence that starts around 4:30 with the women dancing & stomping their feet, timed to match the 'Boom' vocals.

Really a terrific vid, with an energizing, happy feel to it, and it's just such a blast to see Herc and Twankey and Xena & Gabrielle all together in one vid. The only real complaint I have is that I wish the source was better quality. :-)

[mattmn.livejournal.com]

Thank you for all the kind comments about the video. To give you a bit of history, I actually started making Xena music videos in December of 1997 and I made a total of 128 music videos over the next six years or so. I started making my videos before the digital revolution of massive Gigabyte hard drives, so all my vids were done analog, the old fashion way, tape to tape, so there are no effects shots in them whatsover (the split screen you mentioned is actually from the episode Lyre Lyre itself.)

As far as I know, I was one of the first ever people to start making Xena music videos. In July of 1998, I came to the attention of Creation Entertainment and for the next three years they used pretty much all of the videos I made to introduce various stars and stuff at conventions. They were also really nice in giving me free tickets to all of their shows, so during that period of time I was fortunate enough to meet nearly all the casts of both Herc and Xena.

I've started the process (finally) of digitizing my music videos into my computer - mostly for storage reasons and I don't want the original master tapes to deteriorate. The quality of the vids is actually pretty good, with the final third done on SVHS from the commercial tapes of the seasons that Davis/Panzer released from their mail order catalog. I have about 15 or so vids currently sitting on my computer in Sony Vaio's giga pocket format, which I can then export to MPEG 1 (VCD) or MPEG 2 (DVD). I don't know how to send them over the net because even the mpeg 1 file is like 30MB and my email provider can't handle attachments that big. If you have a file sharing tool like AIM, Yahoo Messenger, or MSN, I'd be happy to try and send you another one of the videos and see if you get it.

Thank you for noticing how certain scenes 'time out' with the music, I spent a lot of time searching for really good clips. I actually made four versions of the discotheque video and by your description of the clips, I think you saw version 4 (the earlier versions aren't as good, I sort of refined the process as I went along...) In this version I was so disappointed that Twanky never actually met Xena and Gabrielle, so I (and I hope this is the version you saw) intercut scenes of X and G looking up into the sky and Twanky floating down, so it seemed like they actually 'met' thanks to the power of video editing.

I am currently in law school and haven't made a video since May of 2002. If and when I do go back to videos, they will probably be in a digital medium.

[marycrawford.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the history - I have never been an active Xena fan (although I liked the show, I bailed out early when everyone started getting pregnant with demon spawn *g*) and I've never been to a Creation Con, either. That must be very cool, to show your vids to such a large audience, including the stars!

And 128 videos, tape to tape. That's ... mindboggling. I can't even imagine how tough it is to vid the analog way, but I've got major respect for the people who can do it. I'm under no illusions that digital vids are 'better' - for one thing, as 'She Bangs' illustrates, all the fancy effects just beg to be misused - but I do think it is easier. For instance, in Premiere, if I want a clip and it just isn't quite long enough, I can stretch it by playing it at 98% speed. I don't think something like that is possible in analog vidding. And you don't have the worries about wearing out your masters.

Anyway, I would love to see more of your vids. I'm rearsandvices on AIM - but I'm in the Netherlands, so it may be tough to find a time when we're both awake. *g* There is also SendThisFile.com or we could try ftp. My email is marycrawford at livejournal dot com, of course.

If you want to showcase your digitized vids on a website later on, I think you've got options, by re-encoding them and so on until you get a manageable filesize & quality. Let me know if you need links; I'm a newbie to vidding who knows very little, but I've found some great resources in LJ.

Yes, I definitely saw Discotheque #4; I noticed the clever editing in the Twankey shots. That worked really well, and if I hadn't known the H:tLJ source I might have believed that this was just taken from Xena. :-)