I have returned!
Dec. 31st, 2004 04:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lierdumoaSo I'm back in Berkeley. Got back yesterday after a long train ride. I have a headache -- the third one I recall having since vacation started. I hope I'm not developing migraines like my sister. :|
Right now there's really not much to eat at my co-op. I had a corndog for breakfast. I'm currently drinking tea out of some bag I saw remaining on the tea shelf in the kitchen. I have no idea what kind of tea, but it tastes alright. Now what I'd really love is a good mint tea. And something healthier to eat than a corn dog. Ah, well.
My computer didn't die after all! W00t!!! I had fun last night and this morning having a nice marathon of season 1 Farscape. I figure I probably ought to watch Clerks since I'll need to know the source if I'm going to start on my Jay/Silent Bob vid soon. I'm working on a fairly comfortable 15 gigs of freespace, but I think I'll try to burn enough episodes to get it up to at least twenty before I start vidding again.
So I figured out how I'm going to do effects for my The OC Seth/Ryan vid I'm doing in May. I know it's months before I'll get around to this vid. It's my favorite vidbunny, but I'm not doing any work on it yet as I want to get some more experience under my belt before I attempt it. Hence my rather rigorous vidding schedule.
The song is "The District Sleeps Alone Tonight" by Postal Service. The problem with the song, as is the problem with many Postal Service songs, is that the beat goes much, much faster than the overall pace of the song. Pace being generally more important to a vid than beat, this means a lot of the beat intricacies of the music would go ignored. Too many cuts, too many effects, and the vid becomes unpleasantly fast paced and seizure inducing.
There are a few ways to point out a beat without speeding up the pace of the vid. Freezing frame for a moment would work probably in live action, if not in anime. Matching internal motion would work. Of course there are limitations to this. You can't always find clips that have the internal motion you want, and if you want to utilize freeze frame you have to work it into your effects theme. It's generally a bad idea to throw effects in at random.
Anyway, I've seen a lot of anime vids done to techno and watched how anime vidders dealt with the problem of pace vs. beat. One vid in particular, Euphoria, utilized effects that only appeared in small sections of the screen. They didn't cover the whole window of the vid and so much like internal motion, they didn't necessairily speed up the vid pace depending on how small they were compared to the entire vid window. I figured if I wanted to use effects in my Seth/Ryan vid, I'd have to figure out an effects theme that didn't take up the whole viewing window, that I could at least use in parts of the vid, if not the whole vid.
Usually when I'm trying to figure out effects, I go back to the music and listen to it. One especially fun thing about the song I chose is it's odd popping noises. I thought about it and eventually came up with burn marks. You see burn marks pop up in old film. All I needed to do was find a way to make parts of my vid look like old film, with burn marks popping up on the popping noises. That brought me to one question: how the fuck do I do that?
Making the film look old wouldn't be too complex. I could just partially sepia tone the source, add in a noise filter, maybe lower the frame rate. The burn marks were another matter, especially since I wasn't just asking for any old "aged film" filter to add in burn marks. I wanted them specifically timed.
I figured maybe I could engineer the burn mark effect. I looked in the Adobe After Effects handbook. It was no help, though it did say a lot about animating hexagons (and suddenly a large number of anime vids made a lot more sense).![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
permetaform, last night, showed me how she simulated a burnt paper effect in Adobe Photoshop. I considered her suggestion. It would, of course, have required some frame by frame editing. I dismissed it eventually as I realized that paper doesn't burn like film. Paper just curls and discolors. Film, like, bubbles as it burns. I don't think there's any way I could engineer a photoreal film burn mark from scratch in photoshop.
Solution: Steal the effect. Just my luck, I happen to have Fight Club on DVD. The movie has exactly the kind of burn marks I want in its source footage. I'll probably still have to do some frame by frame editing, but at least I won't need to try and fail miserably to generate burn marks from scratch. Maybe someone else could. That's a bit beyond me, though.
Building on the effects mentioned above, my burn marks, instead of being dark brown and black, will be bleached out to a range of light browns and golds to fit with the color scheme in my vid. They'll also last a bit longer than actual film burn marks, because if they go by too fast regular viewers won't be able to see them. I'd like my vid to finish with a burn mark that starts in the center of the window and eats its way off the screen in an expanding white blob. Way cooler looking than your average fade-to-white. Luckily there's also a model of this in the Fight Club DVD (although it's solarized like whoa and I'll need to do a lot of fiddling with the color scheme). It's not in the film itself, but in a short clip that comes right between the FBI warning (lest we forget that vidding is illegal) and the DVD main menu. I'll have to figure out exactly how to rip that. I thinkabsolut3destiny's vidding guide has some info on the specifics of ripping that sort of thing. There's also an interesting musical pattern in parts of the song which, for lack of a better term, I'll call strobing. It sounds strobelike. I figure I can accomodate this by layering the clips in my vid. One layer would be the regular clip. The top layer would be an aged film version of the same clip. I could use mattes to have a moving opacity gradient of one clip over the other.
Of course, I'll need to be very careful of making sure my vid doesn't end up looking too busy. I don't see this as being much of a problem. I'm pretty good at knowing when effects get too busy and taking them out. There's also the worry that I'll overcompensate and take too many effects out, as was the problem with my last vid whengwyn_r complained that parts were too slow. But eh -- that's what beta's are for.
It just looks so cool in my head, you know?
Anyway, I've hardly done any work on actually planning out the narrative. I have a decent start. I figure I don't need to actually outline seeing as I'm making it in, you know, May. I'm kind of scared of what this vid will do to my mental health. I haven't even started making it yet and it's already on crack. And that's just leftovers from the crack that I'm on.
Right now there's really not much to eat at my co-op. I had a corndog for breakfast. I'm currently drinking tea out of some bag I saw remaining on the tea shelf in the kitchen. I have no idea what kind of tea, but it tastes alright. Now what I'd really love is a good mint tea. And something healthier to eat than a corn dog. Ah, well.
My computer didn't die after all! W00t!!! I had fun last night and this morning having a nice marathon of season 1 Farscape. I figure I probably ought to watch Clerks since I'll need to know the source if I'm going to start on my Jay/Silent Bob vid soon. I'm working on a fairly comfortable 15 gigs of freespace, but I think I'll try to burn enough episodes to get it up to at least twenty before I start vidding again.
So I figured out how I'm going to do effects for my The OC Seth/Ryan vid I'm doing in May. I know it's months before I'll get around to this vid. It's my favorite vidbunny, but I'm not doing any work on it yet as I want to get some more experience under my belt before I attempt it. Hence my rather rigorous vidding schedule.
The song is "The District Sleeps Alone Tonight" by Postal Service. The problem with the song, as is the problem with many Postal Service songs, is that the beat goes much, much faster than the overall pace of the song. Pace being generally more important to a vid than beat, this means a lot of the beat intricacies of the music would go ignored. Too many cuts, too many effects, and the vid becomes unpleasantly fast paced and seizure inducing.
There are a few ways to point out a beat without speeding up the pace of the vid. Freezing frame for a moment would work probably in live action, if not in anime. Matching internal motion would work. Of course there are limitations to this. You can't always find clips that have the internal motion you want, and if you want to utilize freeze frame you have to work it into your effects theme. It's generally a bad idea to throw effects in at random.
Anyway, I've seen a lot of anime vids done to techno and watched how anime vidders dealt with the problem of pace vs. beat. One vid in particular, Euphoria, utilized effects that only appeared in small sections of the screen. They didn't cover the whole window of the vid and so much like internal motion, they didn't necessairily speed up the vid pace depending on how small they were compared to the entire vid window. I figured if I wanted to use effects in my Seth/Ryan vid, I'd have to figure out an effects theme that didn't take up the whole viewing window, that I could at least use in parts of the vid, if not the whole vid.
Usually when I'm trying to figure out effects, I go back to the music and listen to it. One especially fun thing about the song I chose is it's odd popping noises. I thought about it and eventually came up with burn marks. You see burn marks pop up in old film. All I needed to do was find a way to make parts of my vid look like old film, with burn marks popping up on the popping noises. That brought me to one question: how the fuck do I do that?
Making the film look old wouldn't be too complex. I could just partially sepia tone the source, add in a noise filter, maybe lower the frame rate. The burn marks were another matter, especially since I wasn't just asking for any old "aged film" filter to add in burn marks. I wanted them specifically timed.
I figured maybe I could engineer the burn mark effect. I looked in the Adobe After Effects handbook. It was no help, though it did say a lot about animating hexagons (and suddenly a large number of anime vids made a lot more sense).
permetaform, last night, showed me how she simulated a burnt paper effect in Adobe Photoshop. I considered her suggestion. It would, of course, have required some frame by frame editing. I dismissed it eventually as I realized that paper doesn't burn like film. Paper just curls and discolors. Film, like, bubbles as it burns. I don't think there's any way I could engineer a photoreal film burn mark from scratch in photoshop.Solution: Steal the effect. Just my luck, I happen to have Fight Club on DVD. The movie has exactly the kind of burn marks I want in its source footage. I'll probably still have to do some frame by frame editing, but at least I won't need to try and fail miserably to generate burn marks from scratch. Maybe someone else could. That's a bit beyond me, though.
Building on the effects mentioned above, my burn marks, instead of being dark brown and black, will be bleached out to a range of light browns and golds to fit with the color scheme in my vid. They'll also last a bit longer than actual film burn marks, because if they go by too fast regular viewers won't be able to see them. I'd like my vid to finish with a burn mark that starts in the center of the window and eats its way off the screen in an expanding white blob. Way cooler looking than your average fade-to-white. Luckily there's also a model of this in the Fight Club DVD (although it's solarized like whoa and I'll need to do a lot of fiddling with the color scheme). It's not in the film itself, but in a short clip that comes right between the FBI warning (lest we forget that vidding is illegal) and the DVD main menu. I'll have to figure out exactly how to rip that. I think
absolut3destiny's vidding guide has some info on the specifics of ripping that sort of thing. There's also an interesting musical pattern in parts of the song which, for lack of a better term, I'll call strobing. It sounds strobelike. I figure I can accomodate this by layering the clips in my vid. One layer would be the regular clip. The top layer would be an aged film version of the same clip. I could use mattes to have a moving opacity gradient of one clip over the other.Of course, I'll need to be very careful of making sure my vid doesn't end up looking too busy. I don't see this as being much of a problem. I'm pretty good at knowing when effects get too busy and taking them out. There's also the worry that I'll overcompensate and take too many effects out, as was the problem with my last vid when
gwyn_r complained that parts were too slow. But eh -- that's what beta's are for. It just looks so cool in my head, you know?
Anyway, I've hardly done any work on actually planning out the narrative. I have a decent start. I figure I don't need to actually outline seeing as I'm making it in, you know, May. I'm kind of scared of what this vid will do to my mental health. I haven't even started making it yet and it's already on crack. And that's just leftovers from the crack that I'm on.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-01-01 01:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-01 02:38 am (UTC)I really won't know whether I'll be doing masking or photoshopping until I actually start doing this project. I'm thinking it might end up being a combination of both masks and photoshopping. Whatever I have to do so it doesn't look tacky.
no subject
Date: 2005-01-01 01:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-01 02:39 am (UTC)Glad to be back.
no subject
Date: 2005-01-01 01:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-01 04:31 pm (UTC)Thanks!