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Please Buy What I'm Not Selling
2003-10-02 20:10:16
What do you want to read here? What would make this a more interesting journal for you? I like reading other people's journals, because they're often funny or amusing or sad or cute or just plain interesting. And of course I want other people to like reading my journal. Each time I log in and see a couple more journal hits, I feel all warm and gooey inside.
Read my journal! Acknowledge me! Validate my existence! Call me Shinji!
Third Impact, here I come.
heh heh. No, I'm not quite as bad as Shinji. I may have been, back in junior high/early highschool, but thankfully that was a long time ago in a galaxy far far away.
Changing subjects now. Sascha and I worked all day with AdobePremiere 6.0. Hurray! It does almost everything we tell it to! This is fun, even if I have been tearing my hair out over it. At least most of the footage is in place. Now we just need to go back and get a few more clips to fill in some of the blank spots, then fix the timing in a few areas.
Also started on the next video today. Nice way to take a break from the "first," without losing momentum. Need lots more clips for this one; so far, we've only been working with Eva clips, but this second vid will pull from other animes as well.
Now if only I could get paid for this......
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Kid At Christmas
2003-10-02 11:55:46
Finally got a bicycle yesterday night! Too late to ride, so I went out this morning right after breakfast. Remind me never to do that again - my stomach's still churning. But it was fun. ^_^
In reading some other people's journal entries, I see that many others are bored by the standard action video, or videos that just mirror the lyrics, or just hit the beats. Good! Me too! You have my solemn promise that I will never make a Linkin Park video (unless it's some sort of parody), and I will not make a video composed only of images that exactly fit the lyrics with no deeper context or subtext or effects.
One of the first AMVs I saw years ago was guilty of that. It was beautifully done, visually; great quality, smooth transitions, the works. But it did not MEAN anything. It was just a bunch of scenes that matched the words. The song was "Fields of Gold," by Sting.
(A quick note: I've seen several other "Fields of Gold" videos, too, and those were awesome. So if you've ever made a "Fields of Gold" video, don't be offended; this bad one was probably not yours.)
Anyway - Every time Sting sang, "fields of barley" or "fields of gold," the scene showed - you guessed it - a nice golden field of grain. And "...the sun in his jealous sky" was a picture of the sun. In the sky. Golly.
So that's something I'm really trying to avoid. Granted, it's often a good thing to correspond to the lyrics a bit, but NOT EVERY SCENE. feh. Here's an example, and if this sounds bad, please email me to let me know (chibent@earthlink.net). My current project is set to The Calling's "Wherever You Will Go." For the line "...to light the shadows on your face," I have options. If I wanted to make a bad video, I could use one of the many shots of Shinji with his eyes in shadow, or a shot of Shinji's face in the dark with light suddenly falling across it, or something. I will not do that. That would be bleh. But I do want to show him in these scenes - due to what I'm trying to accomplish with this video, it would be counterproductive to show, for example, a tree or bird or wheatfield or something.
So what will I do? Hmm. I may use a shot of him sitting and looking depressed - that would fit the idea of loss and depression. Or I could use that psychadelic scene from ep 25?26? that flashes various inamges inside a line drawing of Shinji. That's almost too literal still, but at least it's more interesting. Or I may think of a better idea.
Okay, that may have been a bad example. But it's the first one that came to mind. I'm tired; I've been biking all morning.
And now - Quick, Sascha! To the BatVid! *insert dramatic exit music here*
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Steadily Plugging Along
2003-10-01 22:29:52
Almost finished grabbing clibs from the DVDs! Yay! But when I finish going through them all, I have to redo Disc 2, because I had some of the settings wrong in VirtualDub. (Which explains why I had so many enormous files.... a 500K clip should not take up 2 -GIGS-.)
I'm already itching to work on my next projects. Ideas come so easily, but the actual execution seems to take a small forever. ^_^ I'm still uber-excited about "The 'First' Video," which is good; I'm just also excited about the next two. I've decided what they will be. I don't want to say. Sorry if I've disappointed anyone.
Back to the grind. Evangelion sure is a long series.......
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Another Day, Another Download
2003-10-01 10:13:32
Except that's a lie. I do not plan to download anything today. Spent two hours yesterday downloading one video. Ah, the joys of dial-up. But it really doesn't bother me, because I remember when 56K was unattainable. Man, we were happy to be able to dowload a little text file in less than three hours. We used ASCII art and Lynx web browser and walked barefoot to the computer lab in the snow uphill both ways wearing clothing made of tacks.
My first computer was an Apple IIGS. It was beautiful. -
Something Else to Ignore
2003-09-30 08:45:21
Making much progress on The "First" Video. Have to put that in quotes, because my actual first video was footage from some computer game (don't know what) set to "Building a Mystery." That was years ago. My second was last year; I used downloaded footage to assemble it, just as a way of figuring out how to do things. It will never be shown or released.
So, the current project is what I consider my first real video. Mandatory Evangelion. I'm ripping footage from DVDs, following the instructions in A&E's Technical Guides to All Things Audio and Video. Spiffy guide, that. So far it's working fine. Sascha gets tired, but she's as determined as I am.
Everyone's made an Evangelion video, so we've worried about redundancy, but I haven't found one using this song and this idea. Good.
If I can make this video look anything like the one in my head, it'll be terrific.
JOURNAL: chibent (Joyce Bent)
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