The Making Of Superman

[lierdumoa]

I'm sure y'all get bored of these "the making of" posts. Who the fuck cares how I made my Superman vid? But see, I really like to hear myself talk. So I'm putting one together anyway.

Behold my staggering geeeeenius !!!!!!1!!OMGWTFBBQ!!2@!!!



[The Idea]

This all started two months back when I was taking a women's studies course on hip hop. Someone mentioned the song in class, and I downloaded it when I got back to my computer. As I sat listening to it I thought to myself -- this would make a great Brian humor vid. Wife-beating Brian. Brilliant. The Brian apologists will want to murder me in my sleep.

*evil cackling*

I thought about how interesting it would be if I switched Brian to Justin POV and Justin became the wife beater in the end of the vid. This idea was scrapped. For one thing, POV changes are hard to pull off without confusing people. For another? I'd just gotten a way better idea.

What's better than making a humor vid to Eminem's "Superman"? Making a serious vid disguised as a humor vid. Start it off funny . Get your viewers to laugh out loud. And right when they start to wind down? Bitchslap them with angst. As I told a few close friends on YIM -- "I going to traumatize the fandom. I'm going to fuck with their minds and make them like it."

But could I pull it off? Could I make a serious vid out of "Superman"? Well, lets take a look at the song. Lets throw in some amateur psychology for good measure. On the surface, this song is about Eminem bashing women, specifically his ex. It's rude. It's sarcastic. It's snarky. Underneath all that, the song is really about Eminem getting burned -- seriously burned -- by his cheating wife, and refusing to get involved in serious relationships because he is afraid of getting burned again.

Remind you of anyone?

Yes, Eminem+Brian=samedamnperson. Both are geniuses in their chosen fields and both have serious mommy issues. In terms of the vid, both have been hurt in their respective romantic relationships, and most importantly, both are completely full of shit. Notice how Brian is always gets especially rude and sarcastic when he's feeling vulnerable? So, so full of shit. And the whoring! Brian and Eminem employ the same coping mechanisms to deal with pain.

The more I looked at the lyrics, the more I realized that this song says everything I ever wanted to say about Brian Kinney.



[The Outline]

Now I knew the theme of my vid. Organizing that theme coherently was a whole new ballgame. The length of the song was at first intimidating. I considered cutting out parts, but realized that I was going to need the whole song to tell a complete story. Organization turned out to be a lot easier than I thought it would be. The song itself is very structured. I posted the structure in an earlier journal entry. I'll repost here:

intro
chorus A
verse 1
prechorus
chorus B

verse 2
prechorus
chorus A
chorus B

verse 3
prechorus
chorus A
chorus B x 3
instrumental

The intro was easy. When you're telling a story, it's typical that you start at the beginning. I used the intro to parody Brian's first meeting with Justin. The first verse is basically Eminem talking about what a callous womanizer he is. In my vid, this translates to Brian being a callous playa -- this covers most of season 1. It's the most literal part of my vid. The only in depth metaphor in that portion is "Bitch if you died, wouldn't buy you life" where on the surface Brian's words in that scene are similar to the lyrics, but beneath that, what he's really saying is "Don't do stupid shit cause I can't always be there to protect you."

The second verse is all about Marshall Mathers bitching out his ex for cheating on him. This fit in very easily with the Ethan arc -- Justin cheating (emotionally) on Brian.

Verse three starts off humorously, so I jumped ahead to Brian reuniting with Justin. After our couple reunites, the rest of season 3 was just lots of happy times between the two. This carried us through till near the end of the verse, when there was a sudden sinister change in tone of the rapping. This matched up with Justin's vigilante arc in season 4. I let the last prechorus to the end of the song cover Brian's cancer arc.

Now, aside from the verses we have a lot of repeated parts. The nice thing about the plot progresssion in the song, is it made it easy to put a new and interesting spin on each repeated part. Take the prechorus, for example. "I do know one thing though/Bitches they come they go" Prechorus 1: "bitches they come they go" represents the ebb and flow of Brian's stream tricks. Prechorus 2: "bitches they come they go" represents Justin leaving Brian for Ethan. Prechorus 3: "bitches they come they go" represents Brian confronting his own mortality after Vic's death (since Vic was a lot like Brian before he got HIV, and Brian now has testicular cancer).

I did the same sort of thing for chorus A. "Bitch you make me hurl" -- season 1, Brian telling Justin he doesn't mean anything to Brian. The second time the line is repeated, it's Brian's disgust at Justin's infidelity. The third time, the words are a complete front. Cancer arc -- Brian is using words to push Justin away before Justin has the chance to leave him and hurt him again.

Finally, chorus B. This is what first appealed to me when I came up with the my idea for this vid. The words "I can't be your superman" can be taken so many different ways. Chorus B 1 -- "I can't be your superman" because I don't do boyfriends. Chorus B 2 -- "I can't be your superman" because you left me. Chorus B 3 -- "I can't be your superman" because I'm not good enough for you.



[The Work]

At this point, I had my idea and my outline. What was left was the actual work.

Step 1: Clipping. I have all the QaF episodes on my computer. I skimmed through them to find the episodes I'd actually need for my vid. I then cut out the scenes I wanted and rendered them into individual video files in WMM. All of the episodes I had as avi's ended up with the divx logo stamped at the bottom. permetaform (my beta) told me how to prevent the logo from getting stamped on, but it meant I had to re-do all of my season 4 clips. I ended up making about 125 clips and using about 80 or 90.

Step 2: Vidding. This part wasn't difficult, really. I already knew pretty much everything I was going to do because of my well organized outline. It was just a matter of getting all the clips down.

Step 3: Editing.

Pt. 1: Timing A. I zoomed in on my timeline so that I could very clearly see all the peaks in the waveform graph that showed me where exactly the beats in the music fell. I then methodically went through my timeline and made sure that all my cuts fell exactly on beat.

Pt. 2: Clip choice. For some of the more obscure lyrics, I dithered about a lot on which clips would look better than others. The "kiss my lips" clip was originally the "frenching" scene at the beginning of 1.17. The clip was too dark and too gray, so I exchanged it for the "icecream kiss" in 1.12. The first time I clipped the beginning of verse three, I didn't include clips of Brian talking to Justin at Babylon. I added them in when I realized I needed more color contrast for the scene. It's one part of the song where the plot kind of grinds to a halt, so I had to make it more visually interesting.

Pt. 3: Timing B. I made sure all the internal motion was on beat. That meant slightly speeding up or slowing down clips. Roughly 90% of the clips in this vid are not at their original speed. When Justin threw the DVD's at Brian's loft door ("don't mean to ruin your plans") I altered the timing so they hit the floor on beat (that one in particular was a suggestion from my beta). Some clips I altered the speed of purely for effect. Any particularly violent actions, like when Brian punches Justin in the face ("end up with two backhands") were sped up slightly for greater intensity. Then keeping them on beat was simply a matter of shifting them right or left on the timeline. That second to last clip of Brian on the floor was slowed down slightly at the end for aesthetic reasons.

Pt. 4: Shine. By which I mean playing with color, brightness, contrast, etc. in clips. I didn't do much in this department. Most of what I did here was at my beta's suggestion (permetaform is the master of all things shiny). I upped the brightness/contrast on all the lip synching scenes with Justin at Vanguard at the beginning of verse three because they were too beige. I added blur to some of my clips that looked too sharp, or were of lower quality and looked too pixellated.

Pt. 5: Aspect ratio. I IM'd my beta a few times (she's much more familiar with Premiere than I) asking "can I adjust aspect ratio in Premiere? Can I shift clips up and down?" etc. My basic problem was this -- my source was bootlegged. All of it. Because I didn't rip from DVD's, I had varying picture qualities and -- worse -- varying aspect ratios. All the season 4 episodes, for example, were 2x3, and most of the rest of my clips (with the exception of "icecream kiss," if I remember correctly) were 3x4. When I rendered my clips in WMM, it made them all 3x4 (WMM's kind of annoying like that), so I had to go back and fix the aspect ratio on the season 4 clips so the faces didn't look all stretched out

Pt. 6: Dimensions. The rest of my clips were at 3x4 and they had the proper aspect ratio, so I had to fix their dimensions. I didn't want a vid with a mix of 3x4 and 2x3 clips. I made them all 2x3 by adding two black bars over my vid clips, at the top and bottom of the at the viewing area. I made them all 2x3 and not 3x4 because 2x3 (720x480) is standard for submitting vids to VividCon. Of course, once I did that, I was cutting off a lot of heads. Here's where the shifting up and down came in. Any time a black bar obscured an important part of a scene, I shifted the clip down so nothing important got covered. As it turned out, the bars were *always* covering something, so I ended up shifting down every single clip in the vid with a 3x4 aspect ratio.

Step 4: Finalizing. I added in credits and exported the vid. I re-rendered the file in widescreen format, so that it was actually 2x3 instead of 3x4 with black bars. It took me a few hours to figure out how exactly to export the vid in the proper format for a Vividcon submission (m2v video file plus a separate wav audio file). For my post, I just let Premiere export in it's default setting (a very large avi), and then exported that resulting file in WMM as a small and large high quality wmv.



All outlining, clipping, vidding, editing, and exporting took place over a twelve day period.



ETA: I had a discussion with kitkatbyte concerning my vid and her critique of it. Feel free to read it here.

Comments

[lennongirl.livejournal.com]

Wow. Thanks a lot for this - I found it extremely interesting.
*off to watch video again*

[lierdumoa.livejournal.com]

:)

[khaleesian.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you gave us the DVD track of vid-creation. I found it as fascinating as the vid is angsty. Which is to say...a lot. Great work! :::loves:::

[lierdumoa.livejournal.com]

:D!!!

Dude, thanks for commenting -- I just realized I forgot to comment on your vid! (which I really liked, btw)

[adrianabr.livejournal.com]

I've been reading this saga on your entries, girl, and just now I watched the vid - it's a great job, well done, the song fits perfectly Brian's behaviour! Thanks for taking your time doing that!!!

[lierdumoa.livejournal.com]

Hey, thanks for watching! I know it's not your main fandom.

:)

[theiax.livejournal.com]

My God, such a lot of work involved and it's all done for love. 'Cause you sure don't get anything else but a few "thank yous". Well done, I loved the vid before reading this, but now....

Thank you again. Great work!

[lierdumoa.livejournal.com]

My God, such a lot of work involved and it's all done for love. 'Cause you sure don't get anything else but a few "thank yous".

Nah, dude -- I did it for the respect. *grins* I could go around telling people I had a brilliant idea for a vid, but especially with this idea, no one was going to believe me until I actually made it and showed them.



You're welcome! Thanks!

[rhiannonhero.livejournal.com]

You are a real vidder!!! I haven't watched it yet. I'm with my family in Disney, so I'll have to wait until I get home, but reading this just reminds me that I'm not a real vidder. You are, though! And go you!!! Wow! very impressed!

[lierdumoa.livejournal.com]

I'm with my family in Disney, so I'll have to wait until I get home, but reading this just reminds me that I'm not a real vidder.

Oh, but you do okay. I've really enjoyed some of your vids! Especially Taxi Ride and Seventeen. :)



You are, though! And go you!!! Wow! very impressed!

:D!!!

That's a big part of why I made this vid, actually. The main reason, of course, was because this idea wasn't going to stop bugging me until I made it real. My second reason was that I knew if I made this, people would start taking me seriously as a vidder.

[rhiannonhero.livejournal.com]

Oh, but you do okay.

Yes, exactly. If I were a real vidder, I'd be like, "OMG! I must do better than okay! I must make everything hit on beat! I must take it all very seriously!" And yet, when I even consider that I think, "Uh, no. That's no fun. I do enough of that with writing. I'll just do it okay and be happy." :)

[lierdumoa.livejournal.com]

And yet, when I even consider that I think, "Uh, no. That's no fun. I do enough of that with writing. I'll just do it okay and be happy." :)

Must be a weird quirk of mine. Anything that takes more than one day to do has to be my best, or I feel like I'm wasting time.

As for keeping everything on beat, that's less about being a vidder and more about how I experience music. I'm always very conscious of rhythm. I played piano all through childhood, and that's probably part of it. When a vid isn't cut on beat, it's always a little jarring to me. I hear the lyrics and see clips to match, so when I hear the beat I want the clips to match that too.

[rhiannonhero.livejournal.com]

Sadly, I've mentioned elsewhere I have no rhythm. I can't dance to save my life, or play any instruments. I'm like a million times worse than Gale Harold. It is very sad considering how much I love music and love to dance. So sad.

[rhiannonhero.livejournal.com]

Anything that takes more than one day to do has to be my best, or I feel like I'm wasting time.

My vids usually take less than a day. Haha!! See? Not a vidder. Also, though, I seperate things out into 'serious', 'serious fun' and 'fun'. Vids fall into 'fun'. Fanfic falls into 'serious fun'. My novel and original works fall into 'serious'. I think at my advanced age of 30 I just have to prioritize what I'm going to go all perfectionistic about.

[lierdumoa.livejournal.com]

Ah, true. Right now I don't have a serious, so I guess I have room for two serious funs.

[ozbrat.livejournal.com]

Whoa. I don't know if I should be impressed or annoyed. Impressed because the effort and work you've put into this video is just astonishing, but annoyed because you've totally scared me off from attempting to make another video in my life! I can't imagine putting even half the effort into mine as you've put. MAJOR KUDOS TO YOU! Thanks for the step by step explanation, I think I may have learnt a few things.

All of the episodes I had as avi's ended up with the divx logo stamped at the bottom. permetaform (my beta) told me how to prevent the logo from getting stamped on

Care to share this knowledge? I've got a few clips I've made myself that I put through DivX and I've often wondered how the logo would affect a vid should it come up on a chosen clip.

[lierdumoa.livejournal.com]

you've totally scared me off from attempting to make another video in my life!

Nooooooo!

*weeps*

That was totally not my intent. First, let me clarify a few things. A lot of what I did in this vid was *totally* optional. For example, the clipping on beat. A lot of vidders -- very popular vidders -- don't consider it necessary for all songs. Personally, I think every song should be clipped on beat, but that's just me.

As for the aspect ratio/dimensions stuff -- I'm the only one I know who's that anal. Most people either just deal with what they have or rip their episodes directly off the DVD's. It's not really that important to the overall effect of the vid.

Shine -- that's something you learn later on, after you get good at all the other stuff. Again, it usually doesn't have that much importance on the effect of the vid. People tend to care more about story than shine.

For the Divx logo, I'll quote pipsqueaky: "There is a way to turn it off. You have to find the configuration program that came with DivX. (On my computer, it's located at C:\Program Files\DivX\DivX Codec\config.exe) Run that program, click on the 'Quality Settings' tab, and check the box that says 'Disable Logo'. Presto! No more logo."

The logo doesn't usually have any effect. People just train themselves to ignore it. It's nicer, though, to not have to deal with it at all.