Meme #3 vidding what

[raven]

Day 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. 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.

Comments

[thingswithwings]

This is lovely, and made me smile. Being able to show, not tell, is worth an awful lot. <3

[raven]

*squish* Yes! Vidding has been a real gift to me, seriously, and I never expected it.

[scribe]

This is really interesting! I have almost the exact opposite experience- writing often feels like impossibly hard work, where I will have a scene in my head and just can't get it onto paper in a way that depicts what I want, but vidding is always vastly easier. I think it's because with vidding I don't have to create something out of nothing.

It's like...the difference between painting and collage, I guess, coming from someone else who has negative arts & crafts talent. If I put an image of a chair in a collage at least it looks like a chair, even if it's not nicely placed. If I try to draw it there's like an 80% chance you won't even be able to tell what it is. I'm a better writer than I am an artist, but in the same way when writing a character I have to spend a lot of effort making them look and sound and act and think like themselves, whereas in vidding that's all already accomplished with total accuracy by dint of using the actual canon clips, and all I have to do is the, er, plot? I guess? That analogy sort of got away from me.

Anyway, between the vidding questions meme and the December topics meme there have been lots of people talking about their experience of vidding lately, and it's really cool how VASTLY DIFFERENT everyone's thoughts are. *hands!*

[raven]

You're right, it's so interesting to hear everyone's take on it! I totally get what you're saying here, it's a great analogy - I suppose my version of it is, with writing, I don't have to look through all the magazines, looking for a chair and then rejigging everything if I can't find one; I can do my own! Huh. Making art is so cool. :)

[scribe]

Huh, that makes perfect sense! I definitely have had the experience of wanting a particular clip and realizing it had never happened in the show, just a thousand million times in fanfiction. :-)

[cosmic_llin]

Yeesh, sorry about your commute! I hope it was better today!

Vidding-wise, sometimes I wonder if it wasn't easier for me to do it the way I did it - just messing with clips for a particular fandom, totally unaware of a larger vidding community that had techniques and conventions and a history. I did so much of my early vidding that way, and didn't really discover vidding as a fandom until later. But here you are, coming into vidding having been to Vidukon and knowing so many vidders and having watched a lot of vids - it's more pressure when you know what amazing vidders there are out there.

(Possibly related, I've been blown away by how excellent your vids have been from the get-go.)

[raven]

It was, thank you! I made it home while still upright. :)

This is really interesting! Because of course I came to writing fic that way - I had worked out the kinks of thinking of myself as a writer before fandom was on my horizon - and I think it must be really fascinating to have that experimental, solo stage with vidding too! I totally have the thing where I'm like, whoa, all my friends are super-cool experienced competent talented vidders, agh pressure! But then, I guess the counterpoint is, all my friends are super-cool vidders, so who would dare be mean to me. :P

(Thank you! I've had SO MUCH good advice, I can't tell you. People are so good and so generous.)

[littlered2.livejournal.com]

*shakes fist at storm* I'm glad you made it in the end.

(What's your route to/from work, by the way? I know you are probably in a rush in the morning and very ready to go home in the evenings, but it would be entertaining if I bumped into you one day.)

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Me tooo. :) I think I actually go in the opposite direction to you! I come in from Cambridge to KX on the main line, and then Northern line to Camden Town.

[littlered2.livejournal.com]

Ah, yes - I am slightly south of King's Cross (Russell Square, which is on the Piccadilly line. I go straight from Wood Green to there without changing, as long as the lines are all running as they should be, but I'm only a ten-minute walk from King's Cross station).