Meme #3 vidding what
Dec. 5th, 2013 09:29 pmDay two! The commute was worse. The commute was the worst. The weather meant trees blown over the line, and I was at King's Cross for hours and then got a train but not a seat so spent my fifty minutes curled into a teeny space between two seats getting up close and personal with First Capital Connect carpet. I finally got home around nine and now I'm three quarters dead.
(The job. The job is... wow. Wow, the job.)
A short meme question today, because I am so tired.![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thingswithwings and such_heights both asked me about vidding: how it differs from writing, for me, and about those times when it's not a terrible awful no-good hobby!
Okay, so. Shim said something nice about my writing the other day, which was this: it's laconic. Like, it can be fancy, but mostly it's not: it sounds like someone leaning against a door and saying, well, like, some stuff happened. Which I think is great, and also congruent with how it feels from the inside: mostly, it comes easy. (Well, it doesn't, writing is hard.) But mostly I think I know what I'm doing. I mean, if you asked me, right now, to write about that time X and Y did Thing A and then B happened, I could probably do it straight into the comment box, and it wouldn't be great literature, but it probably would be competent.
Vidding... is not like that. Obviously part of that is just the nature of the form - you rip, you clip, you realise that wonderful scene in your head is, well, in your head, you stick it together, the rhythm is wrong, the light is bad, everything is awful, it's the worst hobby ever - and part of it is my inexperience. I'm only on vid number four so far and it's all about the process, very much so - I'm still refining my workflow and eavesdropping when other vidders talk about how they do it and figuring out what all the damn buttons do in Final Cut. I am definitely capable of vidding major disaster, I mean, there is no basic competence level here.
The thing is, that makes it sound as though one day I will be a grown-up vidder who can turn out beautiful vids on demand, which is not at all true. I have no visual artistic ability. As long as I've known myself, that's been true - I can picture beautiful things in my head but I can't show them to you. Sadly, my small forays into manipulating vid footage for artistic rather than practical purposes have confirmed this. I can a flip a clip because it looks better mirror-imaged. I'll never be the sort of person who can create, I don't know, comic book panels or amazing manips. But that's okay! I can do stories. And I love music. For me, that's more than enough. And vidding is a great hobby - an awesome hobby, the best of hobbies - when you stick clips on a timeline and work on getting the rhythm right if nothing else, and render and then press play and you've sort of been doing it mindlessly and you don't know what it's gonna look like - and it looks, well, like music ought to look like. It's great. I feel like my vids are not - fandom-typical? I don't know, maybe I just haven't watched enough of other people's vids. But, anyway, that tiny chance I've got, possibly for the first time ever, into really being able to show, not tell - yes! Worth all that wailing about aspect ratio.
(The job. The job is... wow. Wow, the job.)
A short meme question today, because I am so tired.
thingswithwings and such_heights both asked me about vidding: how it differs from writing, for me, and about those times when it's not a terrible awful no-good hobby!Okay, so. Shim said something nice about my writing the other day, which was this: it's laconic. Like, it can be fancy, but mostly it's not: it sounds like someone leaning against a door and saying, well, like, some stuff happened. Which I think is great, and also congruent with how it feels from the inside: mostly, it comes easy. (Well, it doesn't, writing is hard.) But mostly I think I know what I'm doing. I mean, if you asked me, right now, to write about that time X and Y did Thing A and then B happened, I could probably do it straight into the comment box, and it wouldn't be great literature, but it probably would be competent.
Vidding... is not like that. Obviously part of that is just the nature of the form - you rip, you clip, you realise that wonderful scene in your head is, well, in your head, you stick it together, the rhythm is wrong, the light is bad, everything is awful, it's the worst hobby ever - and part of it is my inexperience. I'm only on vid number four so far and it's all about the process, very much so - I'm still refining my workflow and eavesdropping when other vidders talk about how they do it and figuring out what all the damn buttons do in Final Cut. I am definitely capable of vidding major disaster, I mean, there is no basic competence level here.
The thing is, that makes it sound as though one day I will be a grown-up vidder who can turn out beautiful vids on demand, which is not at all true. I have no visual artistic ability. As long as I've known myself, that's been true - I can picture beautiful things in my head but I can't show them to you. Sadly, my small forays into manipulating vid footage for artistic rather than practical purposes have confirmed this. I can a flip a clip because it looks better mirror-imaged. I'll never be the sort of person who can create, I don't know, comic book panels or amazing manips. But that's okay! I can do stories. And I love music. For me, that's more than enough. And vidding is a great hobby - an awesome hobby, the best of hobbies - when you stick clips on a timeline and work on getting the rhythm right if nothing else, and render and then press play and you've sort of been doing it mindlessly and you don't know what it's gonna look like - and it looks, well, like music ought to look like. It's great. I feel like my vids are not - fandom-typical? I don't know, maybe I just haven't watched enough of other people's vids. But, anyway, that tiny chance I've got, possibly for the first time ever, into really being able to show, not tell - yes! Worth all that wailing about aspect ratio.