Vexercise 5 Check In

[lola]

Hi everyone!! How are your vidding and text explorations going? This exercise definitely stretches some potentially unfamiliar design muscles and involves learning some new skills.

I started working with text in vidding this year, inspired by some beautiful vids and AMVs I'd been seeing lately, though its always something I've found really interesting and wanted to try. Actually, I really started playing with text and typography with the videographic essay exercises, and once I saw the possibilities of that, I started thinking more fully about how text can be and is being used effectively for vids.

It seems like quite a few of you have already dove (dived? Hmm) into these exercises. What have you found the challenges to be? What feels like it works? From my limited so far experience working with text, I've found that keeping the editing simple and limiting the text per shot makes a difference, or it becomes overwhelming. But maybe that's not always the case. I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts on this!

OH and this exercise is due this Saturday, May23.

Comments

[seekingferret]

All I've got so far is the original vidlet to have text added. I know the words I'm going to include, I'm still trying to figure out the best way to work that text in. It's hard because it just feels so extra. I'm used to designing images so they land with the lyrics, throwing text on top feels like it's both reducing the impact of that connectivity and overexplaining to the viewer.

[lola]

Ah, I misunderstood your concerns at first but now I understand! I think that this exercise - or anything that is really substantively different from personal vidding styles and preferences we've each evolved over time- can feel really uncomfortable, sometimes so uncomfortable that we might opt out. I did that for the voicover videographic exercise the first time I did those. Only a year later did find a way to incorporate voiceover that still felt true to me, and it was still an uncomfortable at first (fun eventually) process.

In this case, when I started incorporating text, I'd been doing a lot of fast tight cutting and I realized that really didn't work with lyrics. I needed slower editing that evoked mood, but still had room for the meanings and emotional resonance added by the lyrics, and wasn't too much for th view to concentrate on and take jn. But that was just my experience of what worked for me. I think there are many different approaches that can work!

[seekingferret]

Yeah. I've used text before - intertitles in "The Upload", explanatory science labelling in "Speeding Rover", but it was always because I had a specific narrative goal in mind that I couldn't achieve purely with image. Setting out to use text as a visual texture is something that I have to think more about to figure out what I'm trying to accomplish, I think.

[naye]

I've still only been vidding for less than two months, so the nice thing is that everything feels new and challenging! Learning how to make words happen on screen (as opposed to in subtitles, which I had to figure out to translate Japanese dialogue in the audio-clip challenge) was the thing that's made me spend the most time on tutorials so far. The learning curve is interesting - I found it wasn't something I could figure out intuitively, but once I had the tools it was possible to do almost anything with very little additional effort. So that was cool!

I'm medium-happy with the result. I think if it hadn't been for an exercise I would probably have used a more minimalist approach? But learning how to do all the things I kind of wanted to keep them in the vid just to see how they worked in context! And I definitely think I'll want to play with lyrics again - either to use as part of the vid, or because I'm using an audio that needs translating and I'd want to make use of the interesting ways in which you can embed those kind of things.

The most frustrating thing about the process was the fact that even though I was only working on a minute-long vid on a brand new laptop, Adobe Premiere Pro threw a number of fits about it. The worst was when it crashed and reset - as in, I had saves going back every 5 minutes or so for 6 hours of work, and it took all of those with it when it conked out. I had no idea this was something a program could do, so now I'm saving copies of my project as separate files just in case. And it did keep crashing, but never as bad as that one evening when it wiped my work out of existence!

[caramarie]

I think the thing I found most interesting was the difference the text made when I swapped out the music? Especially compared to the first exercise! I feel like you can put almost anything over visuals alone, but adding words in makes things trickier. And I feel like the text was fairly unobtrusive when it went along with the lyrics, but when it went with an instrumental piece it had much more weight.

In terms of setting the text ... I was not very imaginative, haha. I don't have much of a visual imagination, which I don't usually think affects my vidding, but then I don't use much in the way of effects ... and I guess text overlays feel kind of the same way to me.