January
Bones (The Fall of the House of Usher, ensemble)
May
Wobble (Monkey Man 2024, Kid action tribute)
June
Dirty (Shadow and Bone, Crows ensemble + Kaz)
July
Dead of Night (The Witcher Netflix season 3, Yennefer/Thanedd/Yennefer/Geralt)
August
Every Step That I Take (Shadow and Bone, Kaz Brekker)
September
Only Happy When It Rains (Stigmata 1999, Frankie Paige(/Andrew Kiernan))
December
You're Gonna Go Far Kid (The Witcher Netflix, Aplegatt)
Losing My Religion (The Witcher Netflix season 3, Ensemble + Ciri)
Vidding Process Resources
A Vidding Primer - brief intro about the vidding process with resources + community links. 1700w.
A Guide for Discovering Fanvids - originally written in 2023 but archived on AO3 in 2024. How to use AO3 and tumblr to find fanvids. 709w.
How to Leave Feedback on Fanvids - originally written in 2022 for the Witcher Commnent Crawl but archived on AO3 in 2024. Examples of different kinds of comments. 1300w.
Vid Recs
Let’s Talk About Vids - I contributed a vid rec for this vidding zine, a zine run by @cosmic-llin with many contributors this year. Lots of great vids and vid talk!
Vid Rec Ask Game - I pitched the idea of a vid rec ask game during VidUKon and @heliological put this together with help from Gus and Emma. You can check out a bunch of amazing vidder’s recs here in the tag and in the reblogs.
Kuwdora Vid Rec Compilations:
2024 was the year of getting back into writing recs. I wrote over 120 recs for fanvids. I created a series called “Saturday Morning Vid Recs” which gave me a tidy deadline of when to complete/share recs. I wanted folks to see a lot of new and old vids that I’ve found incredible and hopefully encourage people to watch/share.
Saturday Morning Vid Recs:
FEELINGS & THAT DYNAMIC (12 recs, BIG emotional feelings and joy and soul)
Vidder Ask Game - I answered a ton of questions about my vids and vidding process which you can browse through the tag here for text and video and lots of navel gazing and links.
Naked Vid Draft Series (watch kuwdora make a vid)
Dead of Night (The Witcher Netflix, Yennefer/Thanedd):
Process Video: the first 30 seconds
First Draft Sneak Peek
Timeline Progress
Losing My Religion - vid outline, rough drafts, revision notes
Archiving Project - Kuwdora Vids on AO3
2007 Kuwdora Vids (95% complete)
2008 Kuwdora Vids (incomplete)
2019 Kuwdora Vids (incomplete)
The most complete archive list is this pinned post in my dreamwidth. Which you can see from the length why this is a an Ongoing Project to Archive.
Lots and lots of notes and thoughts and details about my 2024 vids, writing recs and trying to write about the vidding process. All beneath the readmore. These are the same questions I've been answering (more or less*) since 2007. 🤯 !!
*I've dropped a few q's from the original meme over the years since they just didn't work for me. But it's 95% the same questions Since The Beginning, aha.
Overall thoughts:
This year I only finished 8 vids and I think I only have one WIP that I started in 2024 that I did not finish and it’s 90% finished so I might try to get that done before Festivids drops at the end of the month.
I spent a significant amount of time thinking about recs and writing recs. My vidding communities originated on journal platforms and the fractured nature of fandom spaces these days means there’s a lot of amazing things people have no idea exists, or they get recced behind discord walled gardens or at online cons. Or vids are passing under the tumblr radar because, as many vidders themselves have noted, tumblr is a very difficult platform for visibility/engagement for fanvids.
I get a lot out of watching vids in discord/con group watches but I really wanted to get back to writing/sharing recs. Cause these are really cool fanworks.
I also spent a lot of time thinking about my vidding process. This year I had a great desire to try and share about what I’ve learned and how I’ve engaged with this creative act, and how it’s been an enduring hobby for me for…18 years. Fuck. That meant I wrote a primer about the vidding process, I started archiving previous things I’ve written about vidding on tumblr. I’ve also started rummaging livejournal/dreamwidth to archive other things I’ve presented at cons and in interviews/community spaces about vidding.
Also trying to (slowly) archive my old vids on AO3. Not everything is on YouTube because of copyright or the source material has nudity/some other obscenity, so my pinned post in my dreamwidth remains the most complete list of my fanvids over the years. For now.
Final vid breakdown:
I made 8 vids. 5 of them were different sources. 3 vids were The Witcher Netflix, 2 vids were Shadow and Bone. Two films (Stigmata and Monkey Man). And a Festivid for the Mike Flanagan show The Fall of the House of Usher. 50% of my vids were ensemble pieces. 90% of these vids I finished in a month, two months at most.
Vidding Process notes:
My biggest hurdle was burnout and my inability to work on my old WIPs that I have been gnashing my teeth to work on and even rewatched the source for and got excited to work on again but didn’t manage to get any traction on them. But also I focused a lot of effort on writing recs and talking about my vidding process, which I think was a good use of the working brain I had left.
The Witcher Netflix remains my favorite thing to be vidding at the moment. I’m vidding so close to the source, so close to my fannishness about the the source, the various witcher canons, and the fandom. Those vids are probably less readable to those who aren’t into the show/fandom, but I fucking adore vidding this show.
Favorite Vid:
Dead of Night - My Witcher Netflix Yennefer/Thanedd vid of intrigue. I love the actress who plays Yennefer, and I really reallllly loved working on this. The feeling of when the verses and choruses were coming together was fannish euphoria. Dopamine of the highest degree.
Hardest to make:
None of these vids were hard to make. Which is something I’ve rarely been able to say when it comes to my vids. The hardest thing I encountered this year was my inertia. I’ve been so burnt out and dealing with job hunting fuckery and a toxic workplace that I just didn’t have the brain to start or work on anything that would be challenging me. I needed fun and frictionless this year, and that’s what I made for myself.
Most successful:
Dirty - Shadow and Bone Crows ensemble. I made this as a premiere for VidUKon. It went over SO WELL and I was elated to watch the chat stream by with cheers and to see some recs and comments come in on it. I let myself play a little with some After Effects transitions I had bought many years ago since I thought the song would greatly benefit from that kind of snappy slick editing. It was a lot of fun and the song went over really well with the audience, too.
My best vid:
These are all my best vids. Every year I feel more confident in what I’m making and how I’m making a vid. If I were to think about what an audience might say might be my best vid - it would either be Dirty/Crows ensemble vid or my Losing My Religion Witcher Ensemble+Ciri vid due to how well I nailed a specific tone and emotional atmosphere.
When it comes to technical/structural best I would say that would be Bones, my Fall Of House of Usher vid. That’s an ensemble vid with something like 9 fucking characters and it was so much to try and cram into a single vid. I framed the vid by beginning with the ending of the show and ended it with the ending of the flashback with Roderick and Madeline. The first Bridge/chorus I did a brief overview of the Usher family and the intrigue/deal with the Angel of Death. Then each verse I introduced two Usher siblings, and then introduced two more and kept stringing the Usher Horribleness along the timeline until it just kept Escalating. It was so much fun. This is the type of vid that is probably most appreciated to watch just after you watch the show when the source material is so fresh in your mind.
Most fun vid:
You’re Gonna go Far Kid, a super niche Witcher Netflix vid. This is not a fun subject, but it was fun to finally come up with a song for an idea that I wanted to do since the summer. This is the type of vid that will probably only make the most sense to people who have read both the books and are fans of the show because it’s a wry commentary about Netflix’s adaptation choices and how it really just…fell flat. My vid notes about this are longer than the actual vid and I rambled even more in the comments to mayoho about it. It’s fun but it’s also ridiculous and really made for that audience of like 4 people. Heh.
Favorite vid moments:
Dead of Night - 3:18-3:48 - Fighting and dancing and fucking. The choreography of this makes my soul vibrate. 🔥🔥🔥
Wobble - 2:08 - 2:18 - This action sequence makes me fucking cackle so fucking much. So much. I love it so much. I also love everything else in this vid, too.
And the entirety of Losing My Religion is my favorite vid moment.
Things I learned in 2024:
I learned it’s possible for me to set up structure to write and post/share vid recs. I also learned that I have quite a lot to say about vidding. I didn’t manage to work on or share anything about song choice (I started writing something for the vidding zine and didn’t get far because brain squish blahs) but I’m also quite happy with how well my vid recs and vid meta was received this year. I wasn’t sure about it when I started working on those projects but it was really gratifying to see folks were interested in what I had to say and share
I also had some revelations about what it is about songs that make my brain tick. Also I realized how my finished vids definitely reflect that “holy shit two cakes” meme you see floating around fic spaces. I’ve made the same exact vid several times and I’ve even been able to freak out (happily and incredulously) when I’ve been able to pin down my vidding style because of that.
I also am still coming to terms with letting go of vid WIPs while also still wanting to figure out how to hack my brain to get the motivation back because I genuinely am excited and want to be working on those vids.
I also learned that I am not going to get tired of vidding The Witcher Netflix and that’s probably not going to change for awhile.
In 2025:
Every year I have ambitious plans that inevitably get derailed. I say as much every year in this meme (go ahead and click thru previous years). The past two years I’ve been in burnout and my health woes are wearing me down in new ways so it’s been a struggle. I need to be less ambitious. But that doesn’t mean I can’t daydream and…have desires. Intentions, maybe. This is all with a grain of salt, right. I want to write more vidding process stuff but that's still ambiguous in my head.
And for the past 3 or so years I keep saying I’ve been wanting to work on my Moonhaven and my Green Knight vids. I’m still not ready to let those fall into my never-finish WIP pile. It’s been strange that I can’t seem to let these two go when I’ve been able to let go of other vid WIPs. So I want to figure out what this hangnail is in my brain about these vids are. Would be a dream to finish them..
I want to write more about my vidding process - and hope that others might find it interesting if I were to actually try and get out all these sticky intuitive things in my head and articulate them.
I want to write more vid recs in 2025, and possibly ping the vidding discord and Fan Tech discord for ideas to make vid rec templates/setting up automations for sharing recs more easily across platforms. I have so many ideas but also I keep spiralling out into burnout. I have at least 2 more Saturday Morning Vid Rec themes that I have vids for I just need to finish writing/formatting. And I want to do another round of Festivid Recs for the 2024 collection that will go live at the end of the month.
I want to continue archiving my old vids on AO3 and maybe remember to crosspost here on my main blog or my @kuwdoravids sideblog, and probably set up some automating crossposting to bluesky.
As for vid ideas. I have so many. I also think I need to set myself up wtih a combination of “vids that are going to be fun and easy to work on” and make sure I have myself set up with clipping so I can just ease right into it when I need the dopamine boost. But I also have a growing desire to finally work on some more challenging vid ideas that I’ve had brewing for awhile.
Some Vid Ideas for 2025:
Captain Janeway Kuwdora Thesis Statement Vid - I discovered my Janeway vidsong in 2019 and it’s been 6 years of rewatching and fannishly meditating on this vid. It might be time to embark upon this. The last time I spent this much time Actively Contemplating for a vid was for High Voltage and…this would be a similar type of Great Character Scope. Huge project though. I have DVDs to rip and 20+ episode seasons to trawl through and clip. But the end result… nobody would be ready. Maybe this year?… maybe.
Interview with a Vampire. There’s only two seasons here but during VidUKon @sandalwoodbox gave a panel presentation on audio editing and the season 2 finale was airing that weekend. My brain just had a cataclysmic idea. Not just an idea. An Idea. Something that would focus on POV and memory / unreliable narrators. This vid concept would be outside my wheelhouse because of the song / audio editing involved. Which is something I haven’t done before (or at least to this specific extent). So it’s scary and new in a way and I think might be really refreshing challenge for me to try.
Sydney Character Vid - The Bear. I’ve rewatched this show like 4 times already and I adore Sydney. I meant to make this vid in 2024 but just didn’t get to it. I have a song, I have the love. I just need to sit down and grind through the clipping process.
Black Sails/Andor. This might be a great vid for WisCon VidParty, and it’s something I’ve been wanting to make for a few years now. Andor season 2 is coming out at some point but I think I could make it without the second season.
Foundation - I have two Foundation vid ideas I keep bouncing around with. I adore the visuals and the actor’s performances so fucking much, and I’m obsessed with Salvor and Gaal. This is something I’m really keen on and am most likely to start and finish since it’s limited source and a relatively contained concept (while one vid would also a tribute to one of my favorite vidders that inspired me when I first started vidding). Also a good idea for WisCon Vid Party if that happens this year.
Now looking back on this list that I’m writing on January 1st 2025 will be fun because odds are I’m going to pop out another 4 Witcher vids and probably hiccup out three impulsive festivid treats that I didn’t think I’d make, lol. I mean I’ll make Witcher vids regardless, I’m just wanting to dream about my other vid ideas for now.
Well, I'll give a quick shout out to Rose Bride My World, which was @tafadhali's answer to this question, as well as Inhuman Illusory Soul Fusion Magic, which are definitely both strong contenders for me. But my personal answer for this one has to be Rain in Derry. It's the most ambitious vid I've ever made and took me the longest to make by far. It incorporates clips from the It miniseries, both movies, and 7 other visual sources that are either movies referenced in the book, or just things I thought I could use to visually represent scenes from the book that aren't in either adaptation. In addition to the visual sources, I also used clips from the audiobook, and whooo boy, let me tell you, picking out quotes I wanted to use, finding those quotes in the audiobook, figuring out how to get the audio of just those quotes into a format I could use in premiere, editing them down to fit within the song's instrumental breaks and have a nice rhythm with the music, and mixing the sound so it all sounded nice and coherent was a project and a half (but also a total blast and I'd do it all again). Aside from how ambitious the task was just in terms of the scope of media used, I also went for a visual style in this vid that was a bit outside my comfort zone, with not only really fast-paced editing, but also lots of overlay effects and masking to combine different clips. It was difficult both for me as an editor and for my computer, which had such a hard time processing all these overlaying clips that by the time I was about half-way done with the vid, I started needing to render or export sections of it any time I wanted to see what my work actually looked like! So yeah, definitely my most ambitious and challenging vid, and one for a source I'm deeply passionate about, so it's gotta be my proudest vidding accomplishment! (wow, that answer got long. oops. I just have a lot to say about this vid lol)
9. What are some fandoms and/or ships you'd like to vid for but haven't yet?
Ooh, let's see, there are so many. A few off the top of my head are...
Yellowjackets - Taf has now made several wonderful vids for this fandom and it seems like a blast to vid, but I don't have any specific ideas myself yet.
Hannibal - another one Taf has vidded, though in this case I have 3 ideas written down that I've had for years now and really just need to get around to making!
Black Sails - I have an idea for this one that I think will be a really nice compliment to my existing gay pirate vid.
A League of Their Own - I have an idea for this one, and it might not shock people who are familiar with my (or Taf's) work to know it's to a Postmodern Jukebox song lol.
Poor Things - my favorite movie of last year, and not something I have any specific ideas for, but think would be SO fun to vid because of both the rich visuals and themes.
9-1-1 - Taf and my newest obsession! I'd honestly love to do a character study of almost any main character, a Buck/Eddie vid, or a Buckley siblings vid for this one, but don't have any song ideas as of yet.
A whole bunch of sitcoms, but especially Schitt's Creek - I want to keep making progress on my BNL Sitcom Vids series, and I have no less than 40 ideas written down, 28 of which are for fandoms I've never vidded, and several of which have already been started, but have been on the back burner for a while. Anyway, I love me some sitcoms, and Schitt's Creek has to be one of my favorites, so once I finish the Good Place BNL vid I've had in the works for a while, that might be the next one on my list to tackle!
A few weeks ago @sanspatronymic was kind enough to ask me about my current vids-in-progress, as a part of the good old vidding meme. And I answered the first half of their query about vid recs and then wandered off, oops! But here I am, back again with some no doubt thrilling previews of my upcoming masterpieces :)
1. Holmes/Watson A Study in Emerald AU vid -- I am, like, 95% done with this one! So close! I’m drawing on Enemy at the Gates as source material to create a story about Holmes and Watson fighting for the freedom of humanity in their dystopian world (casting Joseph Fiennes as Holmes and Jude Law as Watson), and I’ve borrowed the Lovecraftian monsters they’re fighting from Edge of Tomorrow. Editing these two sources together has been a hoot! Plus I spent some fun time on Google Images copying pictures of narratively useful newspaper headlines. Good times!
I initially vidded a little Moriarty framing device, but it wasn’t working, so I spent some time on a hilarious quest to find some shots of “sinister-looking Victorian man reading newspapers” somewhere in the collection of films I owned -- damn you, library closure! (I have discovered, incidentally, that Rufus Sewell in The Illusionist would have made an awesome Moriarty if only he spent less time in uniform). But then I realized it was a silly quest and just cut the Moriarty bits out entirely. So now I just need to go back to Enemy at the Gates and grab about 2 seconds more of footage, and it’ll be good to go! Whew!
2. Fanny Brawne/John Keats Bright Star vid -- I’m solidly in the middle of this one. I’ve clipped the entire film, and I’ve got maaaaybe 20% of the vid timeline filled in so far. It’s going to be quite a long vid -- I’m using Anna Nalick’s “Knots” as the song, which is 6 minutes -- but fortunately for me, the movie is full of long lingering shots that require some time to appreciate. It’s a gorgeous film, and it makes a particularly lovely match with this song, which uses metaphors about thread and knots to talk about the pain of longing for someone who always hovers just out of your reach. The film emphasizes Fanny’s artistic identity as a seamstress and interweaves it with Keats’ better-recognized artistry as a poet. To me the chorus of the song gets at the heart of the film, with the two of them perpetually attached but never able to marry, with Fanny so determined to hold on, and Keats, knowing he’s dying, trying to bow out gracefully and find some peace in the thought of release: “All I want is my fingers in your hair, and I’m tangled up as tightly as I dare. And I know you’re just another life away, and they say if you want something bad enough, you’ll wait, but I’d hate to be wrong. So I tangle me in strings, ‘cause I’m strung out on the way we’re spiraling. I’m a cyclone, and every revolution’s confused; it’s a shame that you seek resolution when I want to stay tied up.” It’s a beautifully keening, sad song, but full of an underlying sense of beauty and love.
3. Dean/Cas SPN Islands vid -- I just started this one recently, and only have a few clips set so far. Hopefully it will grow into a study of how these two repeatedly push each other away because they’re convinced the other will be safer without them. I’m using Sara Bareilles’ lovely song, “Islands”: It’s like I’m standing on the edge with just a telephone wire, trying to get to you first to say the world’s on fire. / Holding my breath until I know you’re all right, because the water will only rise. / When will you realize: you must become an island. You must become an island. You must become an island. Come see for yourself, the horizon is all we have.
4. Castiel character study One Hand in My Pocket -- hee hee, I started this one ages ago and haven’t gotten far at all with it. But this is one of my favorite Alanis Morissette songs and there are a couple of image/lyric matches that I’m so stubbornly in love with that I may eventually pull together the rest of the vid just so I can enjoy those little gems forever :) And just generally, the song is about a person who hasn’t figured themselves out yet but has to keep moving forward, unprepared or not. That really fits Cas’s character.
Those are the only ones actually in progress, but I keep a list of ideas for future projects. Maybe a BSG Kara/Lee vid to Anna Nalick’s “In My Head”; maybe a Jeeves & Wooster vid set to Michael Feinstein, either “The World is Mine” or “You’re an Education in Yourself.” Some ideas on my list are kind of obscure -- maybe a vid for My Beautiful Laundrette with James Bay’s cover of Taylor Swift’s “Delicate,”; I might like to vid John Frankenheimer’s The Train to Regina Spektor’s “All the Rowboats.” Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead to Vertical Horizon’s “You Say.” LOL, odd stuff. We’ll see :)
OMG, there are so many, and I know I’m going to be forgetting a lot, too. Plus, many of my favorite vids have disappeared off the internet, including all the work of HRS1812/humansrsuperior, my all-time favorite Sherlock vidder. All her stuff is gone now *shakes fist at sky* But off the top of my head, here are some favorites that are still out there, in no particular order...
Handlebars (10th Doctor)
My Name is Magneto (X-Men, Erik)
Rolling in the Deep (X-Men, Charles/Erik)
Circus (Granada Holmes)
Read My Mind (Granada Holmes)
The Scientist (BSG, Kara/Lee)
Let’s Get It Started (BSG, pilots ensemble)
Human (BBC Sherlock)
Will you do this for me? (BBC Sherlock)
Arrival of the Birds (BBC Sherlock)
I Thought We Were the Same (Doctor Who, Doctor/Missy-Master)
Bedroom Hymns (Ritchie Holmes/Watson)
Rainspell (Supernatural)
Shut Up and Drive (Sherlock Hound)
Foundations (Doctor Who, Martha)
Pray Be Silent, and Join Me in a Dance (1995 Pride & Prejudice)
And many more that I’m not thinking of right at this moment!
26. How would you describe your style?
That’s a hard one for me to answer...I think just kind of straightforward? I don’t do any effects, and I don’t really approach the type of rapid cutting or layered sound effects of some of the more adrenaline-pumping vidders. I think my style has a lot of traditional vidding elements: rhythmic, often relationship-focused, interested in parallels but not meticulously visually structured. It’s not flashy, but it is geared toward making you feel something. And for slashy vids I am willing to fudge and pair up reaction shots that didn’t originally match in the source material in order to make shared Looks appear more Significant and/or Smoldering :)
15. How do you find the inspiration to make your videos?
For me it usually it starts with the song. I’m the type of person who tends to think of fictional characters when I listen to music, and if I hear a song that I think ‘fits’ a character or relationship, then that’s a great start! And I’ve been listening to songs with fictional characters in mind for many years and only learned how to vid last year, so I have a large backlog of songs already earmarked in my head. I knew I wanted to vid Buster Keaton to “Paralyzer” for years. There’s an Anna Nalick song I listened to 10 years ago in my big BSG phase, and I mentally plotted out a vid to it back then that I still remember almost shot for shot. I just haven’t gotten around to copying all my BSG DVDs yet :) So that’s the best case scenario. On other occasions I’ve just wanted to vid for a particular source, either because it’s been requested in a gift exchange or because I’ve been watching it lately and am in the mood to create something for it. But that segues nicely into...
22. Hardest part of video editing?
For me, one of the hardest parts is picking out a song if I don’t already have one in mind. I spend WAY TOO MUCH TIME on this phase, and it sucks because I’m not making any kind of progress in the meantime and I’m just stuck in the pre-vidding stages for what feels like forever as I impatiently wend my way through YouTube or Spotify like a meandering drunk and give various unfamiliar songs approximately 40 seconds to impress me or not before lurching onward to the next. I do text searches on Genius lyrics. I type things like “songs about genius” or “bantery lyrics” into google and read the forum threads and list-icles that pop up. Theoretically I could be clipping my source material while I’m waiting for my musical inspiration, but in my experience it really helps to know your song before you start clipping, because otherwise you don’t really know what you’re looking for and you can fall into the trap of just obsessively clipping almost every scene because you don’t know what will come in handy later or what you actually want to focus on, and that can suck the joy right out of clipping, which is something that I usually quite enjoy. (That happened to me on my Master & Commander vid. I didn’t know what I was going to focus on, so I wound up clipping basically every shot in the movie and it was a slog. Do not recommend!)
The other hardest parts of vidding for me were the beginning and the ends. Just learning how to vid, and what programs I needed, and how to use them, and what process worked for me, and what technical terms I needed to learn versus which ones I could safely ignore was very intimidating. I’ve been a fan of watching vids for years, but I put off learning to make them myself because I was afraid of the technical learning curve. It helped tremendously to have a friend and beta who could explain things in simple terms and just tell me stuff like what a codec was, or what color correction was about, or which software programs I should download (and that gave me peace of mind that I wasn’t just going to import a bunch of virus-y malware onto my computer, given that programs designed to break copyright blocks on digital material are by their nature kind of sketchy). The first vid I made, that Buster Keaton tribute, was a very slow process for a number of reasons, but one of them was that I didn’t know I needed to correct for variable frame rates in the source material, so after thinking I was close to finished with my editing, I wound up having to re-copy and re-edit every single shot. Stuff like that can be frustrating.
As for the ends: I have learned through bitter experience across two different personal laptops that my computers exhibit a slight time delay in their audio playback. Normally it wouldn’t matter at all: on average we’re talking about a delay of somewhere between 4 to 10 frames, which is often not enough to, for example, make a person’s lips look noticeably out of sync with the sound in a film that I’m just watching on my laptop. We’re talking about a fraction of a second’s delay in the playback, unnoticeable in almost all situations. But vidding tightly in-sync with music is unfortunately one of those rare situations where those few frames matter a lot. What does this mean? It means that I edit together a vid, matching the visuals with the music as I hear it, in my vidding software program. I work hard at getting the timing just right. Then I upload it to YouTube, at which point the music and images that looked perfectly edited before are now somewhere between 4 to 10 frames out of sync. And I just have to eyeball it and keep going back to my vidding program, moving the entire set of images two frames to the left, re-uploading the vid, and seeing if that’s fixed it or if I need to keep adjusting it. I have a crummy internet connection and it takes somewhere between 45 minutes and an hour and a half to upload a vid to YouTube. Which means that this final fiddling process where I’m trying to get the images and the music back in sync is very time consuming and boring, and I have on occasion just thrown my hands up and said, good enough!
21. Easiest part of video editing?
It’s the middle! Once you’ve got your song, you’ve made your clips and you’re ready to start actually assembling the vid, it’s great fun and often the first 80% of the editing goes pretty quickly. Because if you’ve chosen this song it means that you have some ideas about what image sequences you want to build around certain lyrics, and you get to do all your favorite bits first! Combing through the clips you’ve made and finding fun parallels or an unexpected match is great. For me, assembling the vid usually goes quick and easy until you run out of ideas and see what parts of your song you don’t have any plan for. Once you get to the last 15 or 20 percent of the vid you have those tell-tale gaps in your editing timeline and not much idea how to fill them, and that’s when it all slows down again and you spend a long time trying to fill in every 5 seconds of blank space. But the upside is that when you do find something that can fit and you can cross that blank space off your to-do list, it feels very victorious!!
Last Shots of Vids (4/4) — Sweet Dreams are Made of These?
Shati suggested we could start a new vidding meme by looking at the last shots of our vids to see what trends might emerge. Most of my vid endings fell into four main categories.
At first I thought these ending shots (mostly close-ups, and/or of significant things/objects, and/or containing some sort of overlay) didn't belong to any one category, but then I looked twice and saw quite a few aesthetic similarities spread across VERY different sorts of vids. (Other categories here.)
Last Shots of Vids (3/4) — Everybody Look What's Going Down
Shati suggested we could start a new vidding meme by looking at the last shots of our vids to see what trends might emerge. Most of my vid endings fell into four main categories. A LOT of my vids end with people standing around or looking at each other. It's all about the expressions or interactions between characters, or in the character's own sense of self. (Other categories here.)
Last Shots of Vids (2/4) — Go On Now Go, Walk Out the Door
Shati suggested we could start a new vidding meme by looking at the last shots of our vids to see what trends might emerge. Most of my vid endings fell into four main categories. This one might be a common one. (Other categories here.)
