Vexercise 1 Check-in!

[nu_breed]

Hi all! One week in--how are your pechakuchas going?

There have been so many posted already, so awesome!!! Lola and I are both super thrilled that you are all so engaged and inspired :D

For those of you that have already posted, what was the experience like? How did you go through the process of narrowing down your visual source, choosing your clips, choosing your music? Were there any tech issues or other challenges you ran into?

For those of you who haven't yet started where are you at with it? Do you have some things you're still trying to decide on--like your focus, your source, etc? Let us know, maybe we can help you figure it out!

Comments

[mythicmistress]

This is not going as well as I'd hoped- I should probably choose different media (I've been trying to work with the movie Megamind, but finding two pieces of music for the same edit is proving very difficult for me).

It doesn't help that I'm still very new to vidding due to general lack of motivation to do basically anything fannish and having been discouraged by my first attempt at a vid being eaten by YouTube's copyright bots within hours of uploading it.

[nu_breed]

That can be difficult! If it helps this is how I generally approach Pechakuchas:

1. Think about what clips I want to use and sometimes actually start from one piece of music - eg: these ones I started with Watermelon Sugar and built the edit from there, then thought of a song that I felt was similar in tone/theme - they don't have to be wildly different stylistically.

2. Another thing I sometimes do is if I have my clips and the first piece of music I use this site to find a song with a similar key/BPM. I find this can really help kickstart things and often the cuts will fall just right.

[alba17]

Bookmarking that site. Very cool. 🎶

[nu_breed]

Yeah it’s a great help!

[unavee]

I'm bookmarking this, too, thank you! I have a hard time choosing music.

[extrapenguin]

One idea I didn't end up going for by heavily considered with my pechakucha was for the two songs to promote completely opposite readings of the vid – so if song 1 were "there's a hero who's going to save us" then song 2 would be about corruption, or despair, or "we can only rely on ourselves", or something with a contrast to the first song. And then check for the song on YouTube to see if the copyright demons are instadeleting all of it.

[mythicmistress]

That attempt at getting multiple readings of the same clips using different songs is what I think is tripping me up. As for the vid I mentioned, that was years ago, and was a problem with me letting an unedited clip in the vid run for too long, not the song choice.

[aurumcalendula]

I don't think I consciously realized how long six seconds is until I started on this vexercise. I haven't made much useful process on the vexercise yet, but I have make a vidlet as a result of procrastinating on it. I'm going to see if using a different source helps.

[nu_breed]

Yes it is long! My advice would be lots of internal cuts/movement if possible? You’re doing SHL right? Fight scenes are probably a safe choice here I think? Feel free to hmu on Discord if you want to talk it out <3

[aurumcalendula]

tbh part of the problem is I decided to try to make a femslashy vid for two side characters in Kei×Yaku that have a few scenes together. SHL would probably work way better for this

[nu_breed]

You can always use SHL for Pechakuchas and switch for the next challenge if that works for you :)

[aurumcalendula]

Switching sources helped!

[nu_breed]

Yayyyyy I’m so glad!!!

[lola]

Ohhh I am watching Kei x Yaku and want to vid it too!!!

[aurumcalendula]

Awesome!

[frankles]

I set out with the assumption that 6 seconds was really long and got it totally wrong in the other direction... kept thinking clips that were 10+ seconds long wouldn't be long enough haha

[nu_breed]

That's because you chose an extremely dynamic source lol

[frankles]

I found that while you can do really precise things on particular beats/lyrics/musical moments, the format doesn't allow as much precision as I was hoping - by getting one thing perfect I might end up with bits of clips I don't want included. It was fun to work within the limits but this probably means I'll enjoy proper vidding too!

[nu_breed]

Congratulations and welcome to the best and worst hobby ever \o/

[alba17]

It's kind of impossible to get that precise within these limitations, I think.

[valoise]

This year I've decided to focus on The Key to Time story line from the 1978 season of Doctor Who. I've got a rough draft of the first exercise done, but I definite need to tweak it, maybe replace or move around the clips. Also found a song for the second version of the exercise. Some tentative ideas for a couple of the later exercises, too, but I just need to get this first one done

[nu_breed]

That sounds very similar to the way I work with Pechakuchas - good luck with the tweaking!

[marah_sarie]

ooooooh, Key to Time! I love me some Romana, so I'm really excited for this!

[salamandras]

I've changed the source a few times in my head, and may again, but currently have a roughed out idea for both Guardian and Community, and less well formed ideas for Hot Fuzz. I'm doing more planning on paper before clipping, and making more of an effort to include internal cuts than I did last time, and may go with similar visuals in the clips instead of following or building a story, and I at least feel more confident this time.

I do have a question about where to get Handbrake - the reviews I've read (from CNET, from 6 years ago) mention malware on it from that source, which made me uncomfortable continuing. Is there a recommended source to download Handbrake? I assume Handbrake's website would be best, but I wanted to check based on those ancient reviews, and I also have Windows 8... https://handbrake.fr/downloads.php

[nu_breed]

I've never had any issues with it! I grabbed it from Handbrake's website.

[salamandras]

Oh, good! Thank you for letting me know.

[naye]

I also downloaded Handbrake from the website and have had no issues with malware. (Though I'm on Win 10.)

[salamandras]

That's reassuring, thank you!

[alba17]

I don't think mine came out that well. 🤷‍♀️ I chose my source based on it being one of the sources I had an idea for and I feel pretty fannish about it. I just used the song from my idea. For the 2nd one, I wanted to see how it would come out with music of the period in which the show is set and I thought it was an interesting experiment.

I’m not sure what I could have done differently to make it work better. Perhaps a song with less of a beat? Clips with more action? Not sure.

[nu_breed]

Yeah I think when you have to use long clips (and 6 seconds is so long!) that a source that has internal movement/edits is helpful. But I thought yours moved just fine fwiw!

[bluedreaming]

I was expecting the exercise to be pretty hard, so I was pleasantly surprised that the footage mostly came together. I think it also helped that I had a music selection already made, and could shape it to that. The first two segments I put together serendipitously had motion that moved beautifully between them, so that was really encouraging.

What I had trouble with was that I'd not read the instructions properly, and so only realized that I needed two music versions when the first was done. A reminder to read the instructions properly! Six seconds is also a pretty long time, especially for music video footage, so that was a little limiting in what I was able to put together, and I couldn't quite keep to a 100% red palette. However, on the flip-side, all the quick cuts of music videos meant that each six second segment really feels like a lot more, especially for music videos with scene changes.

My biggest struggle is with my computer, as even shotcut seems to maybe be a little resource-intensive for it. I did have a browser open at the time, thought most of the tabs were "off" using auto-discard, so I'm hoping that having only shotcut open will be enough of an edge to allow me to work with more cuts in later exercises.

I need to catch up on watching all the pechakuchas that have already been posted; so exciting!