Vidder Profile Spotlight: kuwdora
| Interviews by Fans | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Vidder Profile Spotlight: kuwdora |
| Interviewer: | |
| Interviewee: | kuwdora |
| Date(s): | November 18, 2011 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom(s): | vidding |
| External Links: | interview is here, Archived version |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
kuwdora was interviewed in 2011 for Vidder Profile.
Some Excerpts
Back when I still had dialup, linzbnl would send me copies of Stargate SG-1 that she burned to disc for me so I could watch on my computer, since I didn’t have enough VHS tapes to record all of the episodes when they were shown in syndication. A few times she had put some of these funny little things that were of Daniel and the team, set to pop music, and some such. They seemed kind of cute and stuff. I specifically remember the “I’m A Slave for Yu” video by MartoufMarty and how silly it was. And I’m pretty sure there was a little tiny .wmv file that was a Daniel-centric Full Circle video that registered in my brain. I thought they were cute but I didn’t make much of them at the time. That was around 2004 or 2005, maybe?Fast forward to 2007. I had visited during my Christmas break. We had watched a buncha Stargate and other things, and firstly I was amazed that the technology to hook your laptop up to the TV was already at the consumer level because I just didn’t know such things at the time. Then she started showing me these things called vids. Now these were vids that were better than the ones that Linz had dropped on a disc as an afterthought. These had a sense of humor, a style, they moved and grooved and some of them were just so fucking interesting that I had to know more and watch them over and over again. It’s something that looked really fun and I wanted to try to emulate it.
The first vids I remember ever seeing that made me go WOW were cesperanza and astolat’s Stargate Atlantis vid Rumble, because it was hilarious and cute and interesting. But then there was That One With the Polar Bears by sisabet because it was just so PRETTY and interesting even though I didn’t even know what the hell due South was at that time, but I remedied that pretty quickly, and mainlined due South and began working on my own first due South vid. At that time I quickly fell in love with sdwolfpup’s due South vids and once I saw You Can Call Me Al I was gone and I NEEDED to learn how to make awesome vids like THAT.
When I vid, I have to vid for hours and hours at a time, especially when I’m first starting out. Otherwise I feel like it takes me forever to get anything done and somehow I grew accustomed to sitting for 5-6 hours in an evening and vidding and then coming back and putting another 6-8 hours on it the following evening.I have found that I want—or at least need to get the first draft out of my system as quickly as possible because I NEEEEEEEEEEEEED TO VIIIIIIIIIIIIIID, NEEEEEEEED TO GET IT OUT, GET IT DOWN. I need to see my idea come to life and move and work with the music.
For the most part I have gone through 3 drafts of a vid before I’ve come to some feeling that it’s Done. Draft 1 is clunky, but probably has a good assortment of what I think needs to be on the timeline. I mean this can differ from vid to vid but going back and rewatching some old vid drafts, I usually have agood handle on things. It’s just a lot and lot and lot of refining that goes on afterwards in Drafts 2 and 3.
Oh my god, it was so much harder than I thought it’d be. I opened up iMovie and was amused for a bit and spent enough time digging around the LJ vidding comm’s memories section learning how to make these things called ‘clips’ -- but I was aghast at how you had to vid linearly. So when I was building on my timeline and decided I wanted to change a clip, I pulled it out of the timeline and OMG everything shifted to the left and snapped together and messed everything else up. I don’t know how long I could last that way.But I didn’t want to get ahead of myself here. I told myself that I would stick with iMovie for at least 4 months because, fuck, this could just be a passing thing and I might just return to writing poetry and fanfic and short stories again after a few weeks, and I didn’t have any money for anything in the first place. I’d try this out. If it was a serious thing then I would upgrade my software and see what else there was to learn about this. But after my first half dozen vids I was just so sick of the limitations and ugly filters on iMovie.
I saved all of my summer job moneys for an actual student license for Final Cut Express and went on from there. The first experience with FCE was not much easier than iMovie because there was a lot to learn, and I had pulled a book out of the local library to learn the terminology and figure out what else I could google to help me make sense of anything.