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

[actiaslunaris]

I'm a methodical vidder, who gets inspired by music, which I then pair with visuals. Of course, the visuals come first, so what I tend to do, when I have time, is listen through a long list of possible music and then whittle down based on what sparks any type of connection with the visuals. Mood of music and lyrics are very important to me.

I tend to then scrub through my source, marking times for possible clips in a text file. I'll open my editor and have the list to refer back to and then trim. Unless I'm very familiar with my source, this is my go-to process, but familiarity will have me making drafts and then pulling in different clips that I think will work better.

For the first exercise, I already knew what my theme was, and the best episode of Gravity Falls to work with. I ended up ditching one of my possible songs and going with an alternate, but I didn't do a lot of clipping. I like the tight focus of pechakuchas, and using longer clips lends itself to less choice, and more testing of what works. I always start with a bigger pool of clips than I end up using.

For the second set of pechakuchas, I spent less time choosing music, and went for the first viable options that said what I wanted them to say in mood and lyrics. The film has a certain mood and themes, so I kept those in mind.

Last time I participated, I didn't have a lot of time to make the first exercise, so I was happy to spend more time and thought on it. Otherwise, I don't think I would have made two sets.

[scytale]

Oh, this is really interesting to read through! I appreciate the notes on your process.

I tend to then scrub through my source, marking times for possible clips in a text file. I'll open my editor and have the list to refer back to and then trim.

I like this idea, and I may have to try this next time.

[actiaslunaris]

I hope it works for you! It's nice to have all the timings together because it works well with a non-linear editor, which I got used to because I started out vidding with Windows Movie Maker and then moved on to an editor that was bundled with a cd burner I bought (an early version of Corel Video Studio, though I keep trying to learn Vegas Pro). Shuffling around clips I can trim in or out at will is very freeing.

[scytale]

Thank you! I've been clipping and saving as separate files, which works to a point, except that I'm terrible at naming and organizing things and I can never put enough context in the filename. Especially since the most important thing to remember about the clip may not actually be what the clip is about.

Writing things down seems like a good way around that, since there's no limit to the amount of information I can put down, and I'm excited to try it. :)