vexercises | Vexercise 3 "Due" Today (and belated background on this vexercise)

Hello everyone!

First off, sorry I missed the check in post last weekend... some stuff was keeping me away from the computer but I've been delighted to come back and see the audio editing supercuts that have come in! We've got a bit fewer (so far) than the previous exercises... I'm wondering if you found this exercise harder than the others, and why? I did, actually! I was thinking it's because it deviates more fully from what we maybe traditionally think of as a "vid"... but I'd love to hear your thoughts on this!

This vexercises is there because, well, really this is a huge genre of fan video, in some fandoms at least, and I thought it would be fun to explore and stretch a bit. But I've found it hard, and am now more than before in awe of some of the amazing audio editing fan videos out there.

Anyhow, enough rambling... If you haven't already, do post yours to the A03 collection! And hopefully some will keep spilling in (like mine :D)

As is our custom, after today we'll make a post that compiles all of the vids created out of the third exercise so you can catch any that you missed, and hopefully offer motivational comments if you have the energy :)

Tomorrow of course Vexercise 4 drops!

Happy vidding :) <3

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Hmm... thoughts on this:

-If nothing else, it was a useful exercise in that it forced me to watch some more Audacity tutorials and become more comfortable using Audacity. Technically, this was a good exercise for me.

- The end result does not feel like a vid I usually make. So I couldn't lean on my normal intuitions about clip selection and pacing, and that was scary.

- What was most interesting to me was how I found myself drifting into youtube style in more than just the audio. My intuitive response to making a vid outside my comfort zone was subconsiously to lean a bit on the stylistic choices of youtube vids I have watched that used audio like this, in terms of color and transitions.

- It was really powerful and satisfying to be able to control the narrative pacing with my audio editing choices. Thinning out the audio by dropping a voice clip, or changing the spacing between audio clips to emphasize more or less of the background music, was an exciting new tool to play with. Usually when I vid I have to work much more within the constraints of the song's pacing.

As a newbie to vidding I'm curious about what you mean with "youtube style"?

Ha, a dangerous question to ask, I may end up babbling for ages.

To be clear, there is no such thing as a single 'youtube style', even though people in my sorta vidding community often uses it as a shorthand for a set of techniques, there are in truth a number of different styles of vid on youtube, and the types of vidders who mostly interact on youtube have their own vocabulary for how to distinguish between a number of distinct styles of vid that you'll see on youtube.

Also, I think the vocabulary of youtube vidding vs. vividcon vidding/lj vidding was a more salient vocabulary 5-10 years ago, at this point there's been cross-pollination both ways and lots of vvc-style vidders are learning a lot from yt vids, so any list of features I might mention, you'd immediately be able to point to vvc-style vids that include some or all of them. So please excuse the laziness of my reference.

But to jump back 5 years, there was a definite sense in our vidding community that there was a type of vid that was extremely popular on youtube and which worked by very different rules than the types of vid that you'd see on LJ/DW. It was characterized by:

- Frequent use of dialogue
- Significant modification of the color grading of the source
- Use of text on-sreen, frequently the lyrics and frequently in eye-grabbing typography
- Dramatic and rapid clip transitions
- Lots of overlays

-And above all else for me, the sense that these choices were not made with the same narrative considerations made in VVC/LJ vids, to the point where I often found these vids incomprehensible when I tried to read them using the techniques I'd developed for reading vids.

I had learned, both subconsciously by way of watching many vids attentively to learn how to do, and consciously and explicitly by way of betas steering me in this direction, that if you're going to do something that grabs the viewer's attention, it has to be narratively motivated. Everything in service to the vid as story or the vid as essay. So I'd watch a vid on youtube in one of my fandoms, and there'd be a sudden shift from a sepia tinted shot to a red-tinted shot and I would try to figure out what thy were trying to say with that color shift, for example. But most likely the true answer was nothing narratively motivated it, they were just trying to create something visually interesting. Much more vid as artwork or vid as poetry than vid as essay.

(My biggest problem of comprehension, personally, comes in some of the most popular action-based MCU vids, where if I try to read them as VVC-style vids, I don't just read them as incomprehensible, I read them incorrectly. Because they are all about motion matching and color matching and not about narrative, some of them don't tend to make distinctions between good guys and bad guys, and so if I read them through my VVC/LJ-lens, where I'm reading a narrative into them, they come out as being jingoistic and militaristic and frighteningly amoral, instead of just being a celebration of the balletic motion and carefully choreographed visual effects of the MCU movies' action sequences, which is clearly their intention.)

cesperanza has suggested that one of the reasons for these techniques on youtube is, consciously or subconsciously, trying to evade youtube's efforts to police copyright. The more dramatically the video has been altered, the less likely to face a takedown notice, so you start trying to make vids that look good when the visuals no longer look like the original media. And even vidders who aren't deliberately trying to evade takedown notices will start to incorporate these techniques if they see that the popular vids, the vids they are trying to imitate, are using them.

In any case, there were ways in which the 'youtube vid' posed problems for our community back then. Festivids depended on an evaluation of fandom rarity, but what to do if your fandom is rare on LJ and not rare on youtube, and so there are hundreds of vids, but none of them say anything comprehensible or interesting to you? Because fo this and other problems of incompatibility, there's a certain derisiveness expressed that I have been trying to train myself out of. I can definitely say that over the past two or three years my vids have definitely taken a lot that I have learned from watching vids on youtube, even as I still focus on the narrative objectives I learned in the LJ/DW vidding community.

But in this case what I meant is that usually in vids, I rarely do much to change the original source's color grade except maybe to match between scenes with different coloration, but when making this vid, because I was doing stuff with dialogue so that it felt like 'a youtube vid', it felt like the video also needed changes to color grade purely for aesthetics. I didn't go as far down that road as I could have, because it wasn't really the focus of the exercise, but it was still interesting to me.

Thank you! This is genuinely fascinating to me. I've never been part of either vidding community, but I've consumed enough vids that I feel I understand what you're talking about? Though I absolutely could not have put any of it in words.

To me it feels like the divide between classic Western vidding (the LJ style, I guess) and anime music videos which are all superfast cuts and effects. Though my guess there was that anime footage can seem really static, so those cuts and effects have evolved to give AMVs more oomph? Which isn't the case for Marvel at all - they always come across as really busy to me.

But yeah, lots to chew on here! Thanks again for sharing.

Yeah, I think trying to give relatively static footage some oomph is part of why AMV's look like they do... also, the fact that it's relatively static makes it easier to do certain effects. In the rare cases where I've vidded animated source, I find myself doing more with masking and compositing than with live action source.

It was difficult - it felt like with the audio and theme constraints I was playing with completely new tools in a very cramped box? Which is probably why I only stuck to sort of...half the instructions, maybe?

On the other hand difficult is interesting and challenging, which is why approached this from two completely different angles and made two separate vids! One of my main takeaways is deep frustration that it's so difficult to find pure audio effects without background music or anything. Oh to have the master soundtrack and pick and choose what to use...!

I just did not have time to work on anything. I wanted to specifically because I don't have much experience in this arena at all (see everything that

seekingferret said above about styles past and present). Audio overlays have never been something I've given more than a passing thought to and for me as a consumer of vids they're not super important or a regular focus for me. So I wanted the opportunity to learn something new, but I didn't have time to learn something new. I may come back to it in the future.

I know I at least approached it completely differently to how I might approach a vid - I constructed a monologue out of the spoken word (despite not speaking Chinese) instead of the more common "use scene SFX/dialogue to accentuate music" technique I see used semioften. (Which I'm not terribly a fan of.) Maybe the original forbidding of music affected participation? After all, most vids have a soundtrack of modern popular music, often with lyrics. I don't think ones silent but for source audio are that common.

Vexercise 3 "Due" Today (and belated background on this vexercise)

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