The Chemicals Between Us: The Making Of
Nov. 24th, 2004 01:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lierdumoaBecause I just love to hear myself talk.
I got the idea for this vid about half a year ago. Right after I saw the movie I thought to myself, "OMG must vid!!!" I skimmed through my Windows Media Player library and hit upon "The Chemicals Between Us" and thought, "Oh, that song is perfect!" I didn't actually get around to making it until about a month ago.
Structure
I didn't really know how I was going to put it together. I knew that I wanted to do something with the finale at the beginning of the vid, since the other TF&TF vids I'd seen had put it at the end. I was determined not to tell a linear narrative, since all my other vids had been very linear.
Then, after showing![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
permetaform the movie and telling her what I wanted out of the vid, she suggested I have scenes from the finale spread throughout the vid. I liked that idea immensely, because it allowed me to coherently piece together the story I was trying to tell in a non linear fashion as a series of flashbacks.
Basically, the vid takes place at the finale. The intro to the vid is a quick run of the movie. TF&TF in 12 seconds. I got the idea to do the intro like this after thinking to myself that Brian and Dom had this whole "starcrossed lovers" thing going on, and if you've ever seen Baz Luhrmann's Romeo & Juliet, he begins the movie with a very quick run through of every significant point, much like the intro to my vid. So we go all the way from the beginning to the present. The finale. Dom's car crashing at the end of the movie.
The idea is that when Brian sees Dom's car crashing into the front of that truck and then flying through the air, his whole relationship with Dom flashes through his mind. First he recalls how they met. I want you to remember -- how we began. How I fell in love with you. Then he recalls Dom speaking to him, and how deeply Dom's words affected him. How his whole worldview began to change through knowing Dom and hearing about Dom's past. The last part of the vid was basically Brian remembering how everything went to shit. First his and Dom's relationships with their female love interests respectively fell apart. Then Dom found out the truth about Brian being a cop. Finally, the vid was brought back to the present, with Dom injured in a car crash. Of course, all of that led up to the present moment -- to him deciding to give Dom the keys to his car and let him go, sacrificing his career in the process.
Of course, I don't expect that too many people saw my vid and immediately thought, "Oh, it's a flashback!"gwyn_r said she saw the vid as a character/relationship study. In the end, I think the character/relationship study aspect of it is more important than the narrative aspect of it. However, the narrative was important for me to have in mind so that I knew what scenes I needed to put where.
Style
I did a lot more with effects in this vid than in any of my previous vids. I knew from the moment I started it that I wanted to make faces into each other. I'd like to thank the directors for being so kind as to keep people's heads in approximately the same locations. It was an effect I had seen and enjoyed in other vids and wanted to try out. Ghosting was something else I wanted to to try out. It worked with the whole flashback concept -- memories echoing on memories. Stream of consciousness connections being drawn between seemingly unrelated actions.
I remember the first night after I finished clipping, I opened up Premiere and spent hours and hours working on the intro. By the end of it I'd only gotten eight seconds done. However, those eight seconds determined for me how I was to style the rest of the vid. The song has a lot of whining and whooshing. The music starts out kind of stacatto and blaring, and then keeps building on itself until it's just continuous noise. I figured out in doing the intro that the easiest way to match the music with the movie was through crossfades. The music is like a set of complex, building noises, ergo the vid should look like a set of complex, building movements.
Some people may have noticed that I flipped a few scenes horizontally.permetaform once wrote a very interesting post (see here) on how left to right motion affects viewers differently from right to left motion. People's eyes tend to start at the left and move right. I kept all these things in mind because this movie has so much movement and I wanted to make sure my vid had the right feel to it.
Credits
Here's where I get my official crazy vidder's badge. The credits. Longest 20 seconds of my life. I was determined to make them look just like the credits in the movie. I had managed to put the words for the credits together in an image editor, back when I first got the idea to make this vid some six months ago. I originally intended to have them fade in and fade out. But that didn't look cool enough, so I decided they needed to streak in and streak out like they did in the movie. I tried doing this in Premiere using "wind" and "blur." Suffice it to say, it looked like ass. So instead, I went back to my image editor and edited the credits frame by frame, then reassembled the frames in Premiere.
First I went to the movie and exported the sections I wanted to edit [1]. Then I erased the words in the original credits. Then I edited my words, separately from the background images. I went back into premiere and put the words on top of the background. The words were on a simple black background, so I used a "chroma key" to make all the black become transparent [2]. I fiddled with the coloring a lot, and in the end made the credits gold, since a lot of the movie is gold.
I still find it rather annoying that the end credits are not quite the same shade of gold as the beginning title.
[1] The software I use for this is Capture Solution. It is free software (although like many other programs it will continuously bug you to purchase a more sophistocated version). You can download it here. It can do lots of really useful things. My favorite feature is the one that allows you to section off a portion of a video file (avi or windows media) and then deposit all the frames in the section into the folder of your choosing as bitmap or jpeg files (if you don't choose a folder the files go in the same folder as your video). I first got this program so I could make mini-movie icons like the ones I kept seeing around LJ all the time. Now that I'm making vid credits, I'm really glad that I have it on my computer.
[2] Some useful facts for reassembling frames in Premiere. The default for importing a still image is something like 150 frames. If you don't want to have to resize each frame after you drop it on your timeline, just go into Edit-->Preferences-->Still Image and change the default duration to 1 frame. Remember that at least half the things you can do in Premiere you can do in bulk. You can import files in bulk. You can drag them to your timeline in bulk. You can drag them along your timeline in bulk. If you want to do a color change or some other effect(s), you can make your changes on one frame, then highlight the rest of your frames, right click-->paste attributes.
Final project screenshot (click on thumbnail):
2.08 MB
I got the idea for this vid about half a year ago. Right after I saw the movie I thought to myself, "OMG must vid!!!" I skimmed through my Windows Media Player library and hit upon "The Chemicals Between Us" and thought, "Oh, that song is perfect!" I didn't actually get around to making it until about a month ago.
Structure
I didn't really know how I was going to put it together. I knew that I wanted to do something with the finale at the beginning of the vid, since the other TF&TF vids I'd seen had put it at the end. I was determined not to tell a linear narrative, since all my other vids had been very linear.
Then, after showing
permetaform the movie and telling her what I wanted out of the vid, she suggested I have scenes from the finale spread throughout the vid. I liked that idea immensely, because it allowed me to coherently piece together the story I was trying to tell in a non linear fashion as a series of flashbacks.Basically, the vid takes place at the finale. The intro to the vid is a quick run of the movie. TF&TF in 12 seconds. I got the idea to do the intro like this after thinking to myself that Brian and Dom had this whole "starcrossed lovers" thing going on, and if you've ever seen Baz Luhrmann's Romeo & Juliet, he begins the movie with a very quick run through of every significant point, much like the intro to my vid. So we go all the way from the beginning to the present. The finale. Dom's car crashing at the end of the movie.
The idea is that when Brian sees Dom's car crashing into the front of that truck and then flying through the air, his whole relationship with Dom flashes through his mind. First he recalls how they met. I want you to remember -- how we began. How I fell in love with you. Then he recalls Dom speaking to him, and how deeply Dom's words affected him. How his whole worldview began to change through knowing Dom and hearing about Dom's past. The last part of the vid was basically Brian remembering how everything went to shit. First his and Dom's relationships with their female love interests respectively fell apart. Then Dom found out the truth about Brian being a cop. Finally, the vid was brought back to the present, with Dom injured in a car crash. Of course, all of that led up to the present moment -- to him deciding to give Dom the keys to his car and let him go, sacrificing his career in the process.
Of course, I don't expect that too many people saw my vid and immediately thought, "Oh, it's a flashback!"
gwyn_r said she saw the vid as a character/relationship study. In the end, I think the character/relationship study aspect of it is more important than the narrative aspect of it. However, the narrative was important for me to have in mind so that I knew what scenes I needed to put where.Style
I did a lot more with effects in this vid than in any of my previous vids. I knew from the moment I started it that I wanted to make faces into each other. I'd like to thank the directors for being so kind as to keep people's heads in approximately the same locations. It was an effect I had seen and enjoyed in other vids and wanted to try out. Ghosting was something else I wanted to to try out. It worked with the whole flashback concept -- memories echoing on memories. Stream of consciousness connections being drawn between seemingly unrelated actions.
I remember the first night after I finished clipping, I opened up Premiere and spent hours and hours working on the intro. By the end of it I'd only gotten eight seconds done. However, those eight seconds determined for me how I was to style the rest of the vid. The song has a lot of whining and whooshing. The music starts out kind of stacatto and blaring, and then keeps building on itself until it's just continuous noise. I figured out in doing the intro that the easiest way to match the music with the movie was through crossfades. The music is like a set of complex, building noises, ergo the vid should look like a set of complex, building movements.
Some people may have noticed that I flipped a few scenes horizontally.
permetaform once wrote a very interesting post (see here) on how left to right motion affects viewers differently from right to left motion. People's eyes tend to start at the left and move right. I kept all these things in mind because this movie has so much movement and I wanted to make sure my vid had the right feel to it.Credits
Here's where I get my official crazy vidder's badge. The credits. Longest 20 seconds of my life. I was determined to make them look just like the credits in the movie. I had managed to put the words for the credits together in an image editor, back when I first got the idea to make this vid some six months ago. I originally intended to have them fade in and fade out. But that didn't look cool enough, so I decided they needed to streak in and streak out like they did in the movie. I tried doing this in Premiere using "wind" and "blur." Suffice it to say, it looked like ass. So instead, I went back to my image editor and edited the credits frame by frame, then reassembled the frames in Premiere.
First I went to the movie and exported the sections I wanted to edit [1]. Then I erased the words in the original credits. Then I edited my words, separately from the background images. I went back into premiere and put the words on top of the background. The words were on a simple black background, so I used a "chroma key" to make all the black become transparent [2]. I fiddled with the coloring a lot, and in the end made the credits gold, since a lot of the movie is gold.
I still find it rather annoying that the end credits are not quite the same shade of gold as the beginning title.
[1] The software I use for this is Capture Solution. It is free software (although like many other programs it will continuously bug you to purchase a more sophistocated version). You can download it here. It can do lots of really useful things. My favorite feature is the one that allows you to section off a portion of a video file (avi or windows media) and then deposit all the frames in the section into the folder of your choosing as bitmap or jpeg files (if you don't choose a folder the files go in the same folder as your video). I first got this program so I could make mini-movie icons like the ones I kept seeing around LJ all the time. Now that I'm making vid credits, I'm really glad that I have it on my computer.
[2] Some useful facts for reassembling frames in Premiere. The default for importing a still image is something like 150 frames. If you don't want to have to resize each frame after you drop it on your timeline, just go into Edit-->Preferences-->Still Image and change the default duration to 1 frame. Remember that at least half the things you can do in Premiere you can do in bulk. You can import files in bulk. You can drag them to your timeline in bulk. You can drag them along your timeline in bulk. If you want to do a color change or some other effect(s), you can make your changes on one frame, then highlight the rest of your frames, right click-->paste attributes.
Final project screenshot (click on thumbnail):
2.08 MB
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-11-24 02:52 pm (UTC)But then I haven't seen the final yet!
no subject
Date: 2004-11-24 03:29 pm (UTC)Relationships are characters too! They've got their quirks and their psychological issues, etc.
But then I haven't seen the final yet!
I didn't change all that much, I don't think. I took out all gratuitous use of minor characters. I'm still not too happy with the ending, but oh well. I deleted all my clips, so it's too late to fix it now.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-24 04:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-24 04:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-27 06:34 pm (UTC)I enjoyed the vid very much, as well. You make me almost want to go out and rent the movie--if only I found Vin Diesel a smidge more attractive. The other guy is hot, hot, hot, though. Rather than watch the movie, I think I'll just watch your vid a few more times. :) Thanks for sharing. Oh, and thanks for all the vidding tips you share, too. I'm just sort of revving up (hee, pun!) to start vidding myself (Smallville), and your and
no subject
Date: 2004-11-28 11:33 am (UTC)Oh, my pleasure. I love talking about how I vid, to the point that I tend to annoy other people.
Thanks so much for the icon space!