Vidding Exercises for Creative Distraction

Hi folks! As promised here are the vexercise prompts and due dates!

We'll also post specifics about each vexercise on each drop day. We've included some examples for each prompt but please do suggest more in the comments!

The schedule for the vexercises dropping is as follows:

May 28th - Pechakucha 2 Ways
June 11th - Visual Continuity
June 25th - Rhythmic Editing
July 9th - Lyrical Play
July 30th - Colour/Colour Grading/Light Building
August 13th - Response fanvids/side character study
August 27th - Free Vid

First, choose your primary source. It can be anything! From a TV series to a web series to music videos or vlogs to behind the scene footage to a movie. We'd originally recommended that you should work with the same one and a half to two hours of source for all vexercises, but hardly anyone actually followed that :D Still, we recommend you work with 2-4 episodes of a given series, or a single film, if you can limit yourself--it will make the process easier! In general, we recommend that you use only this source for all the vexercises, but if a particular activity sparks a creative idea and you want to expand or swap your source, of course you can!  All of the vexercises except for the last are limited to one minute long, to help make them doable and give a creative limit/framework, but once you're done with each, if you're so inspired, you can expand your minute video into a full three minute vid, for Extra Super Very Important bonus points!

1) Pechakucha 2 ways

Create a video edit of exactly 60 seconds consisting of precisely 10 video clips from your chosen source text, each lasting precisely 6 seconds, assembled with straight cuts. Make two versions of your pechakucha, with 1 minute excerpts from two different songs as audio. Fade in and out on your audio at the beginning and end of the audio clip.[Word to the wise: Most six second clips that you use are bound to have in-clip cuts--you don't have to go looking only for clips that have no internal cuts. But you can make those internal cuts work for you rhythmically or thematically etc!]

This exercise is inspired directly by the first of the videographic criticism exercises, but modified here to be vid/fanedit focused with the inclusion of music from an outside source. You can see some examples of the original videographic pechakucha’s here and a more vidlike one Lola made here! And now you can see way more wonderful vidding pikachus on this YouTube Playlist (as well as examples of the other O.G. vexercises at the Vexercises collection on a03! 

2) Visual Continuity

Produce a one minute video edit on your selected source using match-on-action and graphic matches as your primary editing logics. The motion of each shot should seem to continue into motion in the following shot.  Audio should be music of your own choosing.

Here's a really helpful video on different types of match cuts (with lots of helpful Sherlock examples!) This video is about match cuts in cinema and TV, but I think it's really cool how we can adapt these techniques to vidding/fan video editing. 

Some vids that use visual continuity, match on action, and graphic matching (feel free to rec others in the comments!)

Nothing Is Safe (please heed content notes)
Motionography 2012
Multifandom Mashup 2019 (for All the Graphic Matches) 

3) Rhythmic Editing

Produce a one minute video edit where you focus especially on rhythmic editing. Try your hand at time remapping at least once in this video. Choose an audio track that has a clear rhythmic pattern or interesting rhythmic progressions to make your editing experience easier. Reference the wave visualization of your audio track to help guide your editing choices. (If you’re up to it, make 2 versions, one that cuts primarily on the beat, another where you try syncopated editing (cutting on the *and*) and for extra special credit, an extra one that cuts on other instrumentation/vocals – some examples:

Example of emphasis on on-the-beat editing
Example of emphasis on syncopated editing (warning for flashing lights)
A short video on syncopated rhythm (warning for flashing lights)

A short video on time remapping in Premiere
Lim on time remapping (or velocity vidding) in Premiere.
Short video on time remapping in Davinci Resolve
More advanced version for greater flexibility in Resolve

Extra: Examples of instrumentation editing

Iscariot (My Country: The New Age)
Overcome (Star Wars: Rogue One)

4) Lyrical play/no lyrics (3 versions):

Produce a 1 minute video edit from your selected source, in which lyrical interpretation guides your shot choice. You could interpret the lyrics literally or metaphorically/suggestively. Once you have completed this video, choose selected lyrics to incorporate creatively as text within the video. Then make a version of this video with the text, but substituting the original audio with a different piece of music that has no lyrics.

Easiest Cinematic Title Minimal & Clean
How to place video within text
Add text behind a moving object
Typewriter effect
How to Make a Lyric Video
Inspirations for typography (a whole playlist!)

Advanced: Lyrical Play with Key Frames & Masking

Follow the guidelines for the OG version, but try using key frames for moving text or text masking.

Keyframing in Da Vinci Resolve
Keyframing and masking in Premiere Pro

5) Colour/Colour Grading/Light Building

Focus on Color/Color Grading (or colour for those of us who are not from the US :D)

Make a one minute video where you let color guide the logic and flow, either by selection or special effects.

Highly recommended: download an LUT or more and try using it!

There are soooo many LUT resources out there. Here are a few links you could try:

The 70 Best Free LUTs Hand-picked By A Colorist For Your Films
30 FREE Cinematic Luts | Color Grading | How to apply Luts in Adobe Premiere Pro
How to Install LUTS in Davinci Resolve
How To Install LUTs in Premiere Pro 2020 on MacOS super EASY!
How to Properly Install Luts in Premiere Pro for Windows & Mac Users

Advanced: Lightbuilding

Lim talks about this in Demystifying Vidding. Produce a one minute vid where your guiding logic is lightbuilding. Try letting the flow and build of light guide your editing choices throughout.

Example: Lim’s Expo (MCU)

6) Side character study

Produce a one minute video edit from your selected source focusing on a side character, making them the central character of your vid. Audio can be of your choosing.

Examples:
Blackbird (HP fanvid; McGonagall focus)
CEO, Entrepreneur (Word of Honor)

Or, Response fanvid:

Produce a one minute video edit that responds to/remixes another fanvid, Vexercise or other.

If you're going to remix another vid, please do ask the vidder for permission; but there are other ways to respond too, such as your own brand new fanvid as a form of conceptual or formal reply inspired by a particular fanvid.

Examples:

Mei Changsu is Climbing the Mountain (Nirvana in Fire), a remix/response to The Mountain(Nirvana in Fire)
Fire Drills (The Untamed), inspired by Women’s Work (Supernatural)

7) Free Vid!

Deploy any and all of these techniques to make the fan video edit of your heart, including but not limited to your chosen source, length entirely up to you! Try to deploy some combination of the various techniques you explored in the exercises along the way.

Hi again all! So here’s the extra bonus challenge for this round, VfXercise 1.

We’ll keep these pretty simple and relatively open, so people can do them on different software platforms/with different tools. The challenge for this round is as follows:

VfXercise 1: 30 second edit comprised of 10 x 3-second shots, with at least one effect (like an LUT) applied throughout (on AE, through an adjustment layer)

Lola and I both tried this one out in advance, and it was fun! (Though we did discover that AE can be even more obsessive than Premiere, a dangerous realization :)

Here’s my example.

And here’s Lola's

Stay tuned for a separate post about VfX tech, tutorials, etc. which we can build as a resource list as we go. I’m imagining these VfXercises will be a lot about experimentation and exploration, and we can share what we discover with each one.

Hello Vexercise folks old & new! Lola and I have been discussing getting a new round going for Spring and we have decided that now is the time for Vexercises 3.0!

This round will consist of seven vexercises, including the free vid, with two weeks to complete each one (technically! Please see below regarding our “due dates” policy) There will be a choice for most of the rounds, generally drawing on the O.G/2.0 Vexercises with some tweaks here and there.

Logistics:
 
The way this works is: We drop a vexercise every two weeks on Sunday, with some explanation around it and examples. Feel free to ask questions or to share examples of vids that are in the vein of a particular challenge, or relevant resources in that post. We want this to be a collaborative space :)

A week later on the Saturday we'll make a check in post to see how everyone is doing. And the following Saturday, the vexercise will be "due." Then, the next day (Sunday) we'll drop the next vexercise, and follow the same two-week cycle!

Quick note on due dates and rules:
 
Due dates are always as firm or as flexible as you need them to be for your creative process and/or RL schedule. And that goes for pretty much anything re: the vexercises, including the "rules" of each vexercise, even the one minute length. You can take them as iron clad if that helps you, or you can approach them as more flexible guidelines if you'd rather.

We’ll be dropping the first vexercise next Sunday May 29th, which means it will be "due" on Saturday June 11th with the next one dropping June 12th. For now, please feel free to introduce yourself in the comments and let us know what source you might be wanting to play with (if you have decided! If not, feel free just to say hi or ask any questions you might have!)