JOURNAL: Weirdlet

  • Seemed Relavent- Rant and Reason ahead, kindly turn a blind eye. 2008-08-22 21:06:55 Well, I can't think of anywhere else I could put this that would be relavent, so here it goes. Feel free to ignore it- I'm not looking to attention-whore, just release some thoughts before they really get my gorge up.

    I've gotten two (out of a grand total of four) opinions lately, that had me biting back some choice vitriol. I can understand people not understanding or liking my work, but it's the damning-with-faint-praise tone that really gets to me. "Oh, you couldn't have done better, you're just a newbie." "You can't help but be taken in by the shinyness and the ease of just random clips to music." "Don't try anything this complex when you're new. No credit for a new idea or an oddball approach. Do not pass Go." Not direct quotes, but certainly what it feels like when I read them. I know I asked for it, asking for opinions, but- there's some things I feel are fair criticisms, and some that are possibly well-meant but just hurt.

    I know I'm new at this. I'm feeling my way around and learning the ways of the tools I have available, but damnit, on those things that seemed to say I was just tossing random clips in, I made deliberate choices for each of those, because I thought they added something. Do I have to put in a shot-by-shot explanation of why I did what I did? Certainly on the Highwayman video, I may have to put up an explanation that *This Is An Old (ie not in the last 20 years) FOLK SONG- If you think such things are boring to the point of condemning anything associated with them, you will find this video boring. Please to not repeat the obvious.*

    Look. I know that it's an acquired taste, but I thought that the Phil Ochs song, The Highwayman, was beautiful, both musically and story-wise. I wanted to participate in that beauty a little, and with a little imagination, VHD: Bloodlust really works to do that. It's also a matter of pointing out parallels as well as stretching the footage to cover the story- the doomed romance, the hunted hero who is condemned by the ruling majority. As for my choices of repeating footage and those three white flashes, those are both deliberate for all and practical for the repetition. There was only so much footage that did what I wanted, and I thought that it worked, with the occasional flips being so that it was the same image but going a different direction or giving a different feeling, while not jarring by being thirty dramatically different views of one moon. For the gold coins, it was also practical to try and show him showering, or at least promising to shower, a double-handful of gold, which made more impact than just a dismissive single palmful (and the ring in the middle as an implication of a promise to marry after the big score). The white flashes are there to show transition- if you know the story of The Highwayman, you know that in essence it's a ghost story, albeit with a focus on the romance. It shows the transition of 'now', where it's only a memory, and 'then', where it's in living color. The second flash towards the end is when the titular Highwayman is dying on the road, and fading away- it then fades into a snowy scene, appropos of the narrating words "And still of a winter's night, they say, when the wind is in the trees..." After that is the brief instance of still living color, when the highwayman D is riding the road, and the flash is the transition to 'now', where it's a memory in black and white (rather, sepia). One last flash of color with the roses, and then back to the round moon that has lit the way throughout as the music trails off.

    As for Vienna (and yes, it was my very first video. Utterly newbish. I thought it was interesting, and god knows I'm not going to tackle something if I don't have anything I personally want to sink my teeth into), it's supposed to be a mildly romantic, although not *literally* narrative, video about D and Leila. He's infinitely older and more experienced, both in life and in the business of hunting vampires- she's young, hot-tempered, struggling against her limitations and likely to end up badly. As for the beginning shots, the aiming gunmen and the horses with their legs being cut out from under them and floating in midair as they fell, I thought it made for a nice, surreal effect, a contrast to the dainty music and a bit of background on the danger Leila's bulling through. From there we see flashes of her awed and then angry face when the music asks, "Well, if you're so smart, tell me why are you still so afraid?". Then she's rushing into battle with Meier Link and getting her butt handed to her ("You better cool it off before you burn it out"), contrasted by D's stillness and calm. The sun goes down "You've got so much to do and only so many hours in a day."), and D walks off as she rolls off to nurse her injuries from that particular failure. "And you know that when the truth is told, that you can get what you want-" D's hand grasping a bag of gold coins, because that both is part of what she wants, and as a general symbol of rewards- "-or you can just get old," Leila glancing back at Grove, also a member of the mercenary lifestyle and haggard before his time. "You're gonna kick off, before you even get half-way through..." with the scene of D pitching rocks upward to distract the lasers to punctuate the 'kick', then striding slowly and calmly through the field, steady as he goes. "When will you realize- Vienna waits for you?" It's implied that her impatience is what's making it so difficult for her- she doesn't need to hurry and scurry so much, in fact, it's detrimental.

    Next is Leila picking herself up from the ground to the sound of "Slow down, you're doing' fine-" and the image of her younger self running away from her embrace, showing the impatience she's displayed as well as ("You can't be everything you wanna be before your time") a sidefling to how all she's wanted is to be a hunter, holding onto that goal and pushing towards it exclusively, growing up too fast and too hard. "Although it's so romantic on the borderline tonight- tonight..." She's stuck with D under the tree in the rain (so I find rain romantic, so sue me), in forced close quarters where they actually had to talk and connect a small bit. "Too bad, but it's the life you lead, you're so ahead of yourself that you forgot what you need-" Leila's stuck in a tree fighting the dryad-gal, this could be interpreted as memories coming up in the conversation she's having with D. "Though you can see when you're wrong, you know you can't always see when you're right-" She thinks she's killed the monster, got a knife through her forehead, triumphant look- then the dryad-chick starts moving again- look of horror- until the lightning bolt hits her between the eyes, proving it was the right move at the time, even if it was lucky.

    "You've got your passion, you've got your pride-" a picture of Leila in the bar, first aiming at and then showily spinning and giving up her weapon to the sherriff who was asking her to disarm. "But don't you know that only fools are satisfied-" goes with the last image, but I like to think it could be interpreted as a reference to her hard-scrabble life as a bountyhunter. "Dream on but don't imagine they'll all come true..." both referring to Leila's current hardheaded goals, and the next image of Charlotte and Meier necking, which is meant to be a dream image of D's- both for the reference to another vampire/human pair, and because dream images can sometimes be reversed, involving a dark-haired female lover and a pale-haired male as representations. D wakes up, gets on his horse and leaps over the backs of sand-mantas in the gravity-defying next sequence, to the tune of accordian music that, to me at least, makes me think of flying over cities in a balloon. He lands and keeps running.

    "Slow down, you crazy child-" and we continue the scene from earlier, where Leila's younger self was running away and she started to run after it- only to be pulled back from her hallucination and the brink of death-by-chandelier by D. She overshoots and slams into a pillar, pausing a moment to look around herself- "Take the phone off the hook and disappear for a while- it's allright, you can afford to loose a day or two..." and we're back to where she and D are stuck under the tree together, watching the river flow by and taking some time out to talk.

    The next part I've come to realize *was* a bit of a slip-up. It wasn't my intent to really lip-synch but to just imply that D was talking- a repeat of "And you know that when the truth is told, that you can get what you want or you can just get old-" because he wasn't necessarily speaking those exact words to Leila, but that was what was being implied by what he was actually saying. So much for trying to work on two different levels, but I mixed up the duller (but still gorgeous) sight of D talking, with that sidelong look over his shoulder, with images of Charlotte and Meier at the end of their relationship, sort of a 'don't be afraid to try,' either just in his own mind or something he's bringing up, because they could have either gotten what they wanted, or just gotten old/failed (but if they hadn't tried, they'd have gotten old anyway, and never had what they had).

    "-when will you realize, Vienna waits for you." Leila's tending to Grove, who looks distressed, he calms down, and my intent was for it to be a kind of 'giving my blessing/goodbye' moment, as Leila is distracted and looks up when a ring bounces by, to be picked up on the blade of D's sword. Not meant to be literal (the whole thing's not meant to be literal), but kind of a seal of a relationship, a friendship or a partnership or just a bond rather than being two hardened strangers. D offers his hand, Leila smiles and refuses, before climbing onto the horse herself. She's still independant. D smiles.

    Some of the criticisms are constructive, yes, I just feel that more of it was- not unkind, but uninformed. I recognize now that the material I was working with was inferior, and at some point I will have to upgrade, re-rip and re-cut everything, but I think in the concentration on that and in the misunderstanding of my intent, some further criticism was lost that could have been more helpful. 
  • Oddities 2008-03-11 00:28:43 Well- I figure I should put something here, at least. I'm having fun making AMVs, as much of a pain as they can be, and I hope someone out there enjoys them too. I like playing around with some of the songs I like that no one else seems to have heard of, or just aren't as popular.

    Creative smartassery appeals to me. That, and a good wrenching drama or hysterical silly comedy. 
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