Vexercise 1 Check In (2021 edition!)

[lola]

Hi all! Here we are, it's been one week in--how are your pechakuchas going?

So many have been posted already, I'm kind of amazed!! For those of you that have already dived (dove?) in, what was the experience like? How did you go through the process of narrowing down your visual source, choosing your clips, choosing your music? Any tech issues or other challenges you ran into?

For those of you who haven't yet started (um, this includes me) where are you at with it? Do you have some things you're still trying to decide on--like focus, etc? I'm working with a new source and haven't yet decided on which eps I'm going to use, I might just mess around and see what feels interesting!

Comments

[scytale]

Making my set ended up easier this year than when I tried this set of exercises last year; last year, I tried vidding with an anime source, and that was really hard to find clips for. In anime, or at least the one I tried last year, thare a lot of pauses and repeated animations (poeple talking, for instance) or still frames -- not great when you need six second clips. Real people, on the other hand, move and there are more fun camera things to play with. :)

My original song was The Crane Wife's "Curses", which was what I actually matched a lot of clips for. "The Fog" was my second choice...except halfway through I got stuck on "Curses", because the song went in a different direction than "The Fog". ("Curses" felt like a shipping song, essentially, whereas "The Fog" never got there).

So I ended up making "The Fog" the primary song and adding "When The Truth Hunts You Down". And then deciding I didn't like "When The Truth Hunts You Down", going through something like five different songs...and then finally giving up and going back to "When The Truth Hunts You Down".

I dragged "Banana Phone" onto the timeline as a joke, but I think it ended up being my favorite. It was the one I took least seriously and had the most fun making.

I started making a second set -- mainly with the goal of comparing two versions of a single melody, to see how changes in instrument and dynamics affect things -- but I think I've stalled on it. I may do more work on it before the due date, but I think I've learned that I need lyrics to guide me.

In general, I feel like I learned a lot from this!

The constraints make it so much easier to finish something (and experimenting with different songs is both educational and fun), and I feel like the constraints are helpful as a learning tool. Using internal cuts means that I'm paying a lot of attention to how the show is doing its own cuts, and sometimes when things just don't work, I find myself thinking, "oh, it would be nice if I could find [this thing that would work better]".

And I think the constraints forced me to compromise in places, so it's good practice at thinking about which things are okay to cut corners at -- and also, which places are important to get right. I still feel far from the point where I can understand how to get those things right, but thinking about them (and getting them wrong in interesting ways) still feels like a good start.