Vidder Profile Spotlight: here's luck
| Interviews by Fans | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Vidder Profile Spotlight: here's luck |
| Interviewer: | |
| Interviewee: | here's luck |
| Date(s): | September 16, 2010 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom(s): | vidding |
| External Links: | interview is here, Archived version |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
here's luck was interviewed in 2010 for Vidder Profile.
Some Excerpts
I taught myself at first, which in retrospect is hilarious because I had no idea what I was doing. Fortunately I like learning new things and I am really stubborn (just ask renenet).I started watching Buffy vids in late 2001, after I got fannish about the show—honestly, I don’t even remember where I came across my first Buffy vids or what they were. Luckily for me, they were sufficiently mediocre that I thought “Oh, hey, I could do that”; they were compelling in concept (show I love! set to music!) but not intimidatingly awesome in execution. Plus I wasn’t sold on the song choices; I wanted vids set to the music I was listening to, not, like, Linkin Park or whatever the group du jour was. (That said, Ariana had a Spike-centric Buffy/Spike vid set to “In The End” that I did actually like a lot.)
At some point, probably middle of January 2002, I found some notes/hints that bonibaru had written up about vidding, in which she recommended using Adobe Premiere. In late January 2002 I downloaded a trial version of Premiere and grabbed a handful of BtVS episodes from Kazaa or maybe Morpheus; I opened Premiere, dragged in the ep files and an .mp3, and started messing around. I emailed bonibaru at some point fairly early on to ask what export settings she used, since I couldn't make sense of half the options I had, but mostly I just trial-and-errored my way through.
So the first few months I was getting used to the tech and figuring things out on my own. But most of what I know about vidding well I learned from other people, mostly by observing and thinking but occasionally by direct instruction. For example, I can date the start of my understanding of motion in vids to August 2002, when I attended Luminosity’s VividCon panel on motion, in which she walked the panel attendees through her Highlander vid “Don’t Panic.” That twenty-minute talk is probably the most important and formative external event in my life as a vidder.
More generally, I watched a lot of vids that were much, much better than mine and tried to figure out what made them work; and I talked about process and technique and interpretation with people whose opinions I respected: Luminosity, sisabet, Eunice, SDWolfpup, Pipsqueak, dualbunny, Laura Shapiro, and (first, last, and always) renenet.
I enjoyed vidding from the first vid I made, the first time I got a visual to land a certain way in relation to a bit of music; it’s an amazing visceral thrill, and I have never gotten over that. When I finished my first vid and made renenet watch it (not in a beta capacity, more of a “I made this thing and you have to watch it because you’re my best friend” capacity), her reaction was that it was at least as good as the vids we’d been watching, and that was pretty exciting.Of course, as renenet and I watched more and better vids, our definition of “good” began to change significantly, so that became a moving target; the vids I was so proud of in early 2002 make me facepalm now. But vidding became ever more enjoyable, not to say addictive, as I began to understand that the range of things that vids can do was much wider than I’d initially realized.
I think the vid that cemented the “I might be okay at this” is probably “Glorious #1,” because that was the most ambitious vid I’d tried up to that point, the vid where I proved to myself that I could branch out from what I’d been doing (my early vids were really just the same vid five times, except for “Writing Notes”), and it turned out pretty well. Not coincidentally, “Glorious #1” got more positive responses than anything else I’d made, including feedback from Luminosity on the Nummy Treat list, who told me to send it to VividCon, so—yeah, that vid pretty much sealed my fate.
I have lots of favorite parts! I love the initial zing of hearing a song that feels right for something I’m interested in, and the more sustained zing of listening to the song over and over again and letting ideas and themes coalesce around it. Rewatching a show with a particular vid or vids in mind is usually fun. The actual vidding, where I’m laying clips and things are going well and I can actually see myself making some sort of progress—that’s always fun. I love sharing snippets with people who love the show I’m vidding and will celebrate the draft with me or rekindle my enthusiasm if I’m feeling down. Finishing a vid always feels good. Getting feedback is another of my favorite things, especially feedback in which it’s clear that the viewer GOT what I was trying to do, that the point or idea or story or emotional arc came through to her, that she saw some little thing I did that I wasn’t sure anyone would notice, that she saw something cool that I didn’t intend. I make vids because I want to see them, but I post them publically in the egotistical hope that someone else will want to see them too, and feedback is the only way I have of knowing whether other people did in fact find the vid worth their time.