House of Leaves

Day 18 – Where do you get the most inspiration for your vids from?

Watching a show or remembering a fandom can and will inspire me. The urge to vid this character fucking now is a drive. The song - and finding the right one for a vid idea can become such a trying quest - ties everything together. I love it, when I hear a song and it suddenly transforms and becomes all about a character. Best way to hit off a vid.

In the past I kept waiting for a flash of inspiration from a ideal song, but that resulted in long dry spells. This perfect storm of song, fandom and character is rare and unpredictable, so today I have a different approach. If I want to vid, I will think about a subject that intrigues me. If I have an idea or a theme I will search for song. I will take one that could work and make it work. This is exercise, this is me getting an concept out of my system. This is getting more experienced without the crushing weight on my shoulder to make a flawless vid. So that when I find a perfect song I won't be scratching my head, trying to figure out what that avisynth filter was for in the first place. Or how to prepare mkvs so that I can vid them in Premiere and make whole season-avs out of them.

So the most valuable lesson Xandra taught me in recent months, is to go for a crazy idea and run with it. Doesn't matter if I run it into the ground or it takes off. I won't get anything done overthinking vidding and all the inspirations stuck in my head? The vids that never made a timeline outside of my head? Are lost. And there are a few people out there, who really wouldn't mind spending five minutes of their time with Scully/Krycek or Dean/Ruby/Sam, so why not go for it? The mental road block of my own expectations won't do me any good. Vidding is fun and reminding myself of this fact and all the opportunities it creates, was pretty damn freeing this year.

Day 17 – Titles – Do you try to use something different than the song? Why or why not?

Normally not, the main reason why I changed 'Jesus Christ' to 'Wood and Nails' was to avoid people who would search for the first one. Same reason why 'Jesus was my girl' became 'My girl'. I often shorten the song title. ' What's it feel like to be a ghost?' is a mouthful compared to 'To be a Ghost'.

Day 16 – Summaries – Do you like them or hate them? How do you come up with them, if you use them?

I always take a lyric line to sum up the vid. Not necessarily the one that spoke the strongest to me in the first place, but one that expresses the feel of the vid. I used to hate coming up with an additional summary - something deep and significant to best describe the thing you spend days, weeks, months obsessing over? Worst case scenario ten minutes before you hit the post button? Nightmare fuel. Nowadays it's easier, either I get hit by Xandra with summaries till something sticks or by now, I hit on random quotes and change a fitting one to my needs. I know, it's a bit lazy, but I like to pretend that my second language skills only go so far.

Day 15 – Warnings – What do you feel it most important to warn for, and what's the strangest thing you've warned for in a vid?

I don't remember a complaint about the way I handle warnings so far. I assume common sense according to the source, if you watched SPN, AtS, Se7en or TXF you have to know that violence is a big part of these sources and the lives of the protagonists. I will occasionally warn for dark themes, like incest, gore or raw aggression, when it is something that is exploited beyond what a watcher of the source reasonably can expect. I don't warn for slash, the pairing is right there in the subject line and most likely in the cover image. Fandom as whole has moved on, so that hasn't been an issue for a long time.The only controversial topics, I frequently touch on it consent and power, but usually it is done subtle and on a level, I don't feel the need to warn for. I also think the viewers pick up on the fact, if I use the PoV of a villain, that there might be a dissonance to what they usually anticipate.

Sexual violence - I felt bad that I forgot to warn for it, when I first posted 'Dizzy' and edited the post the next day, because it was so very explicit a rape analogy. That it was played as elaborate joke in the ep didn't excuse me for not warning for the graphics.

Strangest warning would be scribble for 'Around the corner'. It came along with 'Disturbing images, blood and scribble'. Because pages of pages filled with crazy ramblings get freaky in Premiere.

Day 14 – Ratings – how high are you comfortable with going? Have you ever vidded higher than you're comfortable with? If you're comfortable with NC-17, have you ever been shocked by finding that the vid you're making is G-rated instead?

I'm European, language and nudity don't really register as 'bad' and therefore don't warrant a higher rating. Naked skin wasn't even on my radar for this answer till obsessive24 mentioned it in hers. Violence on the other hand is and boy, do I like to vid dark things. Season 3 of SPN has a NC-17 (ab 18) rating in Germany and BtVS/AtS/TXF all come with a R-rating anyway, so viewers get what they seek for.

The whole question did take me aback, because I would go as high as NC-17, if the idea calls for this. Shockingly I never had a vid of mine push the rating because of sex, but plenty that I would consider at least R-ratings for violence. Xandra says it is because I'm a prude, which is untrue and therefore unacceptable. It just seems I use my quota of random one-night-stands, sex and mind fucking on her. So yeah, this means I have to remedy the softcore sex quota and vid QaF at some point in the near future.

Another point I would like to address in regards of ratings is intention. I'm generally drawn to dark characters and like to exploit their edges, so the second question got a big fat yes by going way back to a straight-forward example. 'Kinda I want to' has nothing more than a badly manipulated kiss between Angel and Wes, but the whole vid feels darker for me then the obvious PG-13 it probably deserves. With the implied blowjobs, bloodplay, ensuing torture and dub con, plus hospital visits. There are plenty of instances in my vids, that I find darkly funny with what they imply in fandom tropes and not necessarily canon. I know they go over the head of most viewers and that's exactly how I like it. The squirming feeling they probably sometimes get and can't precisely place, while watching my vids? Yeah, there is a (subjective) reason for it, 'Move' would be a prime example for this.

Day 13 – Do you prefer canon or fanon when you vid (canon shots vs. using shots out of context; AU vs. canon)? Has vidding for a fandom changed the way you see some or even all of the original source material?

Let's skip over the first few vids, where I still tried to figure out my editing software more than anything else, basic things like cuts, crossfades or overlays, and I had to work with a very limited amount of clips. Once I had the knowledge to actually tell a story, I started out being very canon oriented and the scenes had to mean something deeper in a very tight context of a relationship to make it into a vid. That's my talking head phase - I truly didn't mind the mouth motion, because I loved the stuff that was said. It was important, so it wasn't jarring to me.

To look out for other stuff was something my early unconventional couples and especially AUs taught me and for that reason alone, I still love them. They truly changed the way I looked at shows and the way I was completely liberated from specific meaning was an unexpected freedom and so I focussed on paralells and had a blast with them, building up a story from next to nothing. You have to search for completely different things in scenes, when you vid AUs. Backgrounds and lightning become more significant. The change of how I prepared my footage was also a big factor: disabled audio. As a result I had to focus in Premiere much more on the facial expressions in a scene. So the way I edit and cut did change dramatically over the years.

Nowadays a shot that looks beautiful might make it into a vid even without much impact on the context, because I can reason it in. I like to think that my vids have a wider context these days, since I like to go for the bigger picture in shows. If the mood of the song fits with the way a scene looks, I will use it. Example would be I rather take a depressing looking scene then the one in which a character explicitly discussed his/her depression. I will rather take a scene of an act, then the one of the reasoning a character gives for it. It's more 'show, don't tell' today and I try harder to include the world a character inhabits to make the viewer understand their motivations better in this context. So as conclusion I would say, I'm more a mood vidder then narrative vidder anyways or at least in the way I understand these terms.

Yes, vidding changed the way I look at all TV shows as potential source material on a superficial level completely. I call it my vidder filter that sometimes picks up on shots I otherwise wouldn't think about. It's very visual. The settings, the mood and especially the lighting of scenes. It didn't change the way I see characters or a fandom, because ultimately you have to work with what you get in TV shows. Which is also the reason, why I get the use of external footage completely. Some stories are better told with more tools in the box or to be more literal, another source on your external hard drive to enhance the mood you are aiming for. Although up to now, I always found what I wanted in a source, even when that means scrolling through several seasons of eps.

Day 12 – Have you ever attempted an "adaptation" vid of a favorite media source but set in a different fandom? (I.e., attempted to bring the 'feel' or 'mood' of one source to a different fandom, like the zombie Mary Poppins vid)

Mmh, I don't think so. Mood manipulation to make a source appear slightly different than it really is, doesn't count, right?

Day 11 – Genre – do you prefer making certain genres of vid? What kind do you tend to vid the most?

Dark is the first thing that comes to mind, although that isn't really a genre on its own. Character study seems like such vast genre, because the song relentlessly gives you the narrative PoV structure even without lyrics. So logically I feel like all of my vids fall into this first, with character driven romance vids second. I mean even my AUs/Constructed Realities are at their core character driven studies and often romances. Yes, even the Impala or Psychopaths had a crush.

Action plays a role in my vids, because movement makes everything more interesting and sometimes it just looks cool. I have a harder time vidding comedy, I don't think I'm very good at it. The things that make me laugh out loud are generally verbal - cutting wit and black humor, so that doesn't translate well into vids for me. I'm not much in physical comedy, besides expressions. So yeah, my comedy vids depend on the juxtaposes between lyric and action and I often fail at it. The genre I vidded even less is episodic, I made one for 'Waiting in the Wings', that's it.

Day 10 – Pairings – Have you ever gone outside your comfort zone tried to vid a pairing you liked, but found you couldn't, or a pairing you didn't like, and found you could?

I ship plenty of mainstream pairings, but I love unconventional couples in vids and fanfics and ship wars are something I don't really understand, it just seems silly. I only have five stalled projects on couples I didn't feel strongly enough to finish, but mostly this was me playing around one evening and then letting the idea go without deleting the project. The other projects in that folder will get finished at one point in time. My outdated to-do-list includes several pairings, I probably won't realize, because I moved on from these fandoms. What keeps annoying me, is when I stumble over a perfect song for a pairing I have lost interest in or I don't feel strongly enough to vid in the first place. This has nothing to do with my comfort zone and all with my impulse to not let a good song go to waste.

Going outside of my comfort zone is a bit hard, because I don't think I have a defined comfort zone. The motivation for a project comes either from a place of love or 'wouldn't it be cool'-desire, so I don't associate negative emotions with vidding. Even the challenges Xandra and I issue are positive, we want to see something very badly and we know the other can provide it. Besides I don't believe in restricting myself, especially not this year.

So maybe my answer would be the impulse behind the Cordelia/Fred vid 'Crazy'. It was my first femme slash vid and more importantly, my statement about every male character pining for Fred. I didn't want to bash Fred, but I needed to vent my anger and react to the final straw, Spike's crush on her. So why not by Fred falling in love with Cordelia first, which lead to 'Crazy' and all was right again in my world.

Day 9 – Pairings – For each of the fandoms from day two, what are your favorite pairings to vid?

TV Shows:
Angel the Series: It's a toss-up between Cordelia/Angel and Angel/Wesley, but the show has so many great pairings. I could randomly draw two names out of a hat and come up with a vid.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: I go with Willow/Spike for het. I was taken aback by the parallels, I didn't expect quite so obvious ones. Angel/Spike for slash, clearly they have issues and history.
Supernatural: Dean/death, uhm, let's go with Dean/Sam. Yeah, much healthier.
The X Files: C'mon, Scully/Mulder
Multifandom: Damon/Stefan took over a large junk of my section in 'Those days', I had to cut it back with a machete.
Deadwood: All of them, even the ones I haven't vidded yet - Trixie will star in a vid at one point.
Lost: Jack/Sawyer, yeah that pairing never happened outside of a Multifandom vid
Alias: Surprisingly I had more fun with Sydney/Sark and Sydney/Will than the show's OTP
Veronica Mars: Veronica/Logan, they are both beautifully damaged
Better off Ted: Veronica/Ted - These two are the most fun you can get. Their facial expressions are hilarious.
Haunted: Frank Taylor/Simon - what a fucked up relationship

Movies:
Se7en: The seven deady sins. Seriously, the gore in this movie is an art form.
Troy: Briseis/Achilles, Brad is half naked for most of the movie - this is exactly my jam. I refuse to feel any guilt, the movie was epic in my eyes.
Interview with the Vampire: Lestat/Louis
and Die Hard: McClane/explosions