Vidding

V is for…

I tried my hand at ‘vidding’, or fanvidding, a long time ago – it looks like the fall of 2002 through January of 2003. If you don’t know, vidding is the process of editing different clips of a TV show or movie along with other sources of video or audio to come up with your own montage or sequence, like making a ‘music video’ featuring the characters of your favorite fandom.

I’d bought some Roswell episodes in video file format on burned CDs, desperate for a better rerun fix than my old home VHS tapes, which weren’t holding up so well. The quality of the video files wasn’t astounding, but having them there did mean that I could play around with them using Windows Movie Maker, and I came up with my first two fanvids using those source files – a Max/Liz tribute to Faith Hill’s song ‘One,’ and a really angsty Michael/Maria third season montage to go with Roch Voisine’s “With these eyes.” I guess I thought of that latter connection because of the lyric at the end of the chorus, “‘Cause a sad song doesn’t care whose heart it breaks,” and Michael was always talking about how he didn’t want to hurt Maria ifhe had to leave her, but in mid Season 3 she’s the one who walks away and he’s the one who ends up shattered.

I always meant to get back into fanvidding over the years, especially as my DVD collection of good shows grew and I learned good techniques for ripping them into video files that I could import into an editing program. I started work on a third Roswell fanvid, an Alex/Isabel concept with Collin Raye’s song “Not that Different”, around January of 2006. I tried putting together a Heroes video in the fall of 2007, after buying the season 1 box set. I wanted to use the LeAnn Rimes song “The Safest Place,” which had a lot of lyrics which seemed to relate to the show, especially ‘I want to believe I can save the world, and make it right / But I’m only human, and you have a hero’s face’ in the chorus.

Incidental – I’ve been drafting this post on the bus, and pulled out my Ipod nano to check and see if it had ‘Safest place’ on it to check the lyrics. Not only was the song in memory, but it was the song that had just started playing when I turned the ipod off last time! That was a sort of spooky moment.

Anyway, Windows Movie Maker no longer seemed to be reliable enough – maybe the fact that I was actually trying to use good quality video files as input was throwing it off. Finally, in 2010, I made it a resolution that I was going to start vidding again, and began by looking for decent video editing software to do it with. I went to a few vidder forums to find out what they recommended, passed over trialing the Adobe package, and really liked Sony Vegas when I gave it a dry run. This little West Wing montage, based on a Michael W Smith instrumental track of all things, was my test project for Vegas during the 30 day trial.

And since then, I’ve made a few more videos – this Doctor Who Amanda Marshall sequence, which I referred to and linked to in the Top Ten songs blogfest:

I finally finished the Heroes Leann Rimes vid:

And there’s also a little project I made for a Buffy-Angel scavenger hunt run by the Toronto group. The list of items to ‘find’ was:
A Buffy Gentleman
Angelus or The Beast from Angel (I included both, actually, the scene where Angelus stabs the Beast in the back.)
A Reaver
A Bad Horse
A Scary Dollhouse
A Creepy Cabin in the Woods (I went with Buffy and Cordelia hiding out during the episode ‘Homecoming.)

I grabbed the appropriate visuals from Joss Whedon DVDs and a Dollhouse episode I downloaded off the ‘net, carefully wrote the script for narration to match the timing, and recorded it using my Acer Aspire netbook’s webcam microphone, in the funniest voice I could manage. Then I used one of Vegas’ built-in audio transforms to make the narration even sillier, and mixed in some creepy-sounding background music from their sound themes package. (After trying to download Theremin music from the net, and deciding that none of it really fit.)

However, a lot of my work didn’t really end up counting for the scavenger hunt, because the judging was held at Cafe Mirage in Toronto, and the restaurant was too loud to hear any of the sound from my eeePC. The Judge was able to see my video elements, and gave me basic points for them, but that was all. I posted the youtube link to the group later, before youtube took it down on FOX’s behalf, and the judge mentioned that I’d have gotten bonus points if she’d been able to hear the narration at the time. Oh well.

Any ideas for what my next vidding project should be?