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jinkyoThe Professionals
Escapade 31 Premiere
Escapade 31 Premiere
Warnings: Guns, blood
Music: "This Is Not A Love Song" audio edit, Public Image Ltd.
Music: "This Is Not A Love Song" audio edit, Public Image Ltd.
AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29351235
DropBox: https://www.dropbox.com/s/cpg67adczoqiyei/1_jinkyo_thisisnotalovesongFINAL2.mp4?dl=0
I've been in love with this video since last fall and under the cut I'll type at length why.
The PiL vid showed up as a suggested vid one day on YouTube. Note, I like a few PiL songs and even fewer Sex Pistols songs. John Lydon's voice is a certain mood that I'm rarely (but not never) in. Anyway, it was the most interesting looking thing on the page so I clicked.
https://youtu.be/9BGi8u8BtaA
Musically, the song has a ton of interesting parts which I loved. The song is also 4 1/2 minutes long, which is definitely a part of the gimmick of the song, but way to long to hold my interest. I was, at that point and still am, pretty sold on the idea that 2 minutes is the sweet spot for my fanvids. So, the song needs to be cut down and I don't actually have a source to go with it yet, but the song is too good not to use eventually.
There was a very brief period of time where I contemplated using this for a multi-fandom enemies-to-lovers concept vid. If someone wants to take that idea and run with it, run! Soon after I spoke that idea into existence and did the first pass at research (Google, give me a list of enemy-to-lover ships), I lost interest.
So it went back to being a song with no video ideas until I figured out how to edit the song so that it would work for something I would be hella' interested in vidding - Pros! And by late summer the video sprang to life.
Audio edit. Stupid long song with explicit lyrics about commercialized music. Right, so let's get rid of all those lyrics first.
This is the earliest edit that I uploaded to test YouTube copyright strikes, to listen to the audio at any time I wanted, and because I somehow forgot how to encode PAL formatted video for YouTube. https://youtu.be/bi641gXJXuA
It's 3 minutes, still bores me after a while, and I still don't have a clear idea of what the visuals will look like. But I listened and watched this first cut and, like, 10 slight variations of subsequent cuts for weeks. Eventually, I started a paper cut to assemble the story, which was kinda' convoluted,
To my ear, Lydon uses two distinct voices in the song, a nasally, very indignant voice - which my brain immediately assigned to Doyle, and a softer more, almost crooning voice (yes, this is Bodie). At various times both voices are singing together. This was perfect for vidding a version of a fanfic genre that I love the best - the boys falling in love unawares to themselves, some crisis forces that love to the surface, one or both of them struggle against the inevitable, they try to pass it off as sex only, but HA! it's love, then they commit and live happily for now! swoon!
But then I spent months making other vids, while enjoying this story in my head along with the music, and had not actually started building the timeline. Clipping was a pain in the ass. Seriously, because there are so many episodes. I self-selected somewhat in that I'm shallow and not overly in love with Bodie's look in series 1 (very 70s dated and hair too long), nor Doyle's look in series 4 (very 80s dated and hair too 80s). Series 2 and 3 were the sweet spots. I also had some specific clips that I wanted to use that didn't make the cut, including a section that was titled "Doyle in Danger".
The vid-in-progress at roughly one month from premiere: https://youtu.be/CGRoL7akcm0
The story in the vid-
Once I started laying clips and seeing them with the music, the story solidified and became roughly: Doyle realizes pretty early on that he's in love with Bodie but doesn't act on it because why mess up the partnership? But then CRISIS! Doyle gets shot, and Bodie is kinda' concerned... Doyle's his partner after all, why wouldn't he be worried, this is normal, doesn't mean he's in love with the guy, right? So then Bodie withdraws because he won't admit that he's in love with Doyle and Doyle pushes because he's totally in love with Bodie and he knows it's reciprocated (even if Bodie is being a stubborn donkey about things). Then Doyle literally chases Bodie down and forces him to admit it and then they start having casual sex. Lots of it, and Bodie is pretty happy with this set-up, but Doyle always wants more (and Bodie does too, but he never said it out loud because he doesn't want to mess up the partnership and the great sex). So eventually they commit to their mobile ghetto for life. No more birds, they tell Cowley, they are together. And they live happily til the end of the vid! *swoon*
Credits
I dig that little bit of Pros incidental production music and that got locked in fairly early as the intro. Finding the intro Capri shots was more problematic because there is a lot of footage to comb through and most of the other shots I found were too short or broke the axis rule. I fudged the two opening shots close enough. If I dug through the footage more I could probably find a better match cut.
The title screen was one of the last things I built. I'm not a titling person, usually I'll stick all the info on a black slate at the end of the vid and call it a day. Last year I made some effort at incorporating the titles into the vid. I think this looks amazing when I see it in other vids. For this, I ended up recreating an episode title screen for the opening credits. The bonus was that I could hide my dodgy car clips behind the text as I opted not to use a drop shadow on the text so viewers (hopefully) would be distracted trying to read the words. (The show also forgoes the drop shadow, however, they do a much better job of popping the text over an appropriately contrast-y background).
This title screen was directly influenced by the title work I'd done on "Toxic". Not fancy, but a sight better than the title screen for "Do I Wanna' Know".
DaVinci Resolve learns-
I spent a good amount of time in Fairlight making the audio edit. There are some of the precision, wave level, edit options that I've missed from Adobe Premiere and can't quite figure out in Audacity. I was able to chop and screw sections of the music, build one new bar of music to bridge two clips, and sew everything back together with minimal seams showing. Honestly, editing the songs down is as much fun as building the timeline.
I did not use the auto clipping tool for this mainly because because I'd learned that the tool breaks the clip handles (and I wanted to have frame shifting handles), and because I didn't want to sift through the hundreds (1000s?) of scene-change-clips each episode might yield. I'm not quite at the POI level of knowing this footage yet, so paper scene and time-code notes were very important for my manual clipping process.
I did use the Subtitler. YouTube used to have a great Subtitle tool that was intuitive. They updated it when they switched to the Studio and now it's very fiddly to subtitle. DaVinci Resolve's tool is a better solution now.
I briefly played with some color grading. Briefly. I had a rough idea of "ooh! make the colors *pop*", but soon realized how much work would be involved and abandoned that. BUT, I do want to keep a candy-colored Pros vid idea in my pocket.
And that's it. The vid is not groundbreaking or innovative, and even I can recognize that the narrative is muddled (like, it's clear as a bell in my head but I'm not convinced that this translates to the timeline. Oh well). But I am in fucking love with this video and now it's out in the world for other people to see too!
DropBox: https://www.dropbox.com/s/cpg67adczoqiyei/1_jinkyo_thisisnotalovesongFINAL2.mp4?dl=0
I've been in love with this video since last fall and under the cut I'll type at length why.
The PiL vid showed up as a suggested vid one day on YouTube. Note, I like a few PiL songs and even fewer Sex Pistols songs. John Lydon's voice is a certain mood that I'm rarely (but not never) in. Anyway, it was the most interesting looking thing on the page so I clicked.
https://youtu.be/9BGi8u8BtaA
Musically, the song has a ton of interesting parts which I loved. The song is also 4 1/2 minutes long, which is definitely a part of the gimmick of the song, but way to long to hold my interest. I was, at that point and still am, pretty sold on the idea that 2 minutes is the sweet spot for my fanvids. So, the song needs to be cut down and I don't actually have a source to go with it yet, but the song is too good not to use eventually.
There was a very brief period of time where I contemplated using this for a multi-fandom enemies-to-lovers concept vid. If someone wants to take that idea and run with it, run! Soon after I spoke that idea into existence and did the first pass at research (Google, give me a list of enemy-to-lover ships), I lost interest.
So it went back to being a song with no video ideas until I figured out how to edit the song so that it would work for something I would be hella' interested in vidding - Pros! And by late summer the video sprang to life.
Audio edit. Stupid long song with explicit lyrics about commercialized music. Right, so let's get rid of all those lyrics first.
This is the earliest edit that I uploaded to test YouTube copyright strikes, to listen to the audio at any time I wanted, and because I somehow forgot how to encode PAL formatted video for YouTube. https://youtu.be/bi641gXJXuA
It's 3 minutes, still bores me after a while, and I still don't have a clear idea of what the visuals will look like. But I listened and watched this first cut and, like, 10 slight variations of subsequent cuts for weeks. Eventually, I started a paper cut to assemble the story, which was kinda' convoluted,
To my ear, Lydon uses two distinct voices in the song, a nasally, very indignant voice - which my brain immediately assigned to Doyle, and a softer more, almost crooning voice (yes, this is Bodie). At various times both voices are singing together. This was perfect for vidding a version of a fanfic genre that I love the best - the boys falling in love unawares to themselves, some crisis forces that love to the surface, one or both of them struggle against the inevitable, they try to pass it off as sex only, but HA! it's love, then they commit and live happily for now! swoon!
But then I spent months making other vids, while enjoying this story in my head along with the music, and had not actually started building the timeline. Clipping was a pain in the ass. Seriously, because there are so many episodes. I self-selected somewhat in that I'm shallow and not overly in love with Bodie's look in series 1 (very 70s dated and hair too long), nor Doyle's look in series 4 (very 80s dated and hair too 80s). Series 2 and 3 were the sweet spots. I also had some specific clips that I wanted to use that didn't make the cut, including a section that was titled "Doyle in Danger".
The vid-in-progress at roughly one month from premiere: https://youtu.be/CGRoL7akcm0
The story in the vid-
Once I started laying clips and seeing them with the music, the story solidified and became roughly: Doyle realizes pretty early on that he's in love with Bodie but doesn't act on it because why mess up the partnership? But then CRISIS! Doyle gets shot, and Bodie is kinda' concerned... Doyle's his partner after all, why wouldn't he be worried, this is normal, doesn't mean he's in love with the guy, right? So then Bodie withdraws because he won't admit that he's in love with Doyle and Doyle pushes because he's totally in love with Bodie and he knows it's reciprocated (even if Bodie is being a stubborn donkey about things). Then Doyle literally chases Bodie down and forces him to admit it and then they start having casual sex. Lots of it, and Bodie is pretty happy with this set-up, but Doyle always wants more (and Bodie does too, but he never said it out loud because he doesn't want to mess up the partnership and the great sex). So eventually they commit to their mobile ghetto for life. No more birds, they tell Cowley, they are together. And they live happily til the end of the vid! *swoon*
Credits
I dig that little bit of Pros incidental production music and that got locked in fairly early as the intro. Finding the intro Capri shots was more problematic because there is a lot of footage to comb through and most of the other shots I found were too short or broke the axis rule. I fudged the two opening shots close enough. If I dug through the footage more I could probably find a better match cut.
The title screen was one of the last things I built. I'm not a titling person, usually I'll stick all the info on a black slate at the end of the vid and call it a day. Last year I made some effort at incorporating the titles into the vid. I think this looks amazing when I see it in other vids. For this, I ended up recreating an episode title screen for the opening credits. The bonus was that I could hide my dodgy car clips behind the text as I opted not to use a drop shadow on the text so viewers (hopefully) would be distracted trying to read the words. (The show also forgoes the drop shadow, however, they do a much better job of popping the text over an appropriately contrast-y background).
This title screen was directly influenced by the title work I'd done on "Toxic". Not fancy, but a sight better than the title screen for "Do I Wanna' Know".
DaVinci Resolve learns-
I spent a good amount of time in Fairlight making the audio edit. There are some of the precision, wave level, edit options that I've missed from Adobe Premiere and can't quite figure out in Audacity. I was able to chop and screw sections of the music, build one new bar of music to bridge two clips, and sew everything back together with minimal seams showing. Honestly, editing the songs down is as much fun as building the timeline.
I did not use the auto clipping tool for this mainly because because I'd learned that the tool breaks the clip handles (and I wanted to have frame shifting handles), and because I didn't want to sift through the hundreds (1000s?) of scene-change-clips each episode might yield. I'm not quite at the POI level of knowing this footage yet, so paper scene and time-code notes were very important for my manual clipping process.
I did use the Subtitler. YouTube used to have a great Subtitle tool that was intuitive. They updated it when they switched to the Studio and now it's very fiddly to subtitle. DaVinci Resolve's tool is a better solution now.
I briefly played with some color grading. Briefly. I had a rough idea of "ooh! make the colors *pop*", but soon realized how much work would be involved and abandoned that. BUT, I do want to keep a candy-colored Pros vid idea in my pocket.
And that's it. The vid is not groundbreaking or innovative, and even I can recognize that the narrative is muddled (like, it's clear as a bell in my head but I'm not convinced that this translates to the timeline. Oh well). But I am in fucking love with this video and now it's out in the world for other people to see too!
no subject
Date: 2021-02-25 04:22 am (UTC)I also liked this choice of song, for the theme. All the best Lads-getting-together stories have that 'will they or won't they' game of tag going on. The teasing/sneering side of Lydon's vocal style really matches the yes/no/yes narrative momentum.
It's fascinating to see the path you travel, moving from general idea to finished vid, and how the polish of your vids reflects that considered and thorough groundwork.
no subject
Date: 2021-04-18 04:56 am (UTC)I love editing these two so much. As with every single vid, there are things I'd do differently, in hindsight, but I'm getting better at channeling those thoughts into "do differently for the next vid".
Is it weird to keep saying how much your work has influenced my approach to vidding? As in, there are many great vids in the world, but my own fannish interests tend to be very narrow and obsessive. I may see a great Marvel vid, but I don't really care about Marvel so, aside from being wowed the first time, I don't get much out of the vid on rewatch. In your catalog, I found a ton of truly spectacular vids for a canon that I'm passionate about and thus - I watch way too often and closely.
So, now I think about the storytelling aspect more and have found a sort of linear workflow that works for me.
I'm currently on a slow learning curve of learning how to incorporate effects. Urg - I'm hanging out on a Discord with the younger Instagram/TikTok vidders, the Sony Vegas Pro crowd with the extreme vid coloring and text on screen style. That's not exactly the style I want to emulate, but I'm very interested in how they're manipulating the footage and adding effects, and how I can incorporate those techniques.
It's a very slow learning curve though, LOL!
no subject
Date: 2021-04-21 07:49 am (UTC)Thank you so much, for your kind words about the vids I've made. I really appreciate the feedback, and it gives me the push I need to get the next project underway.
I love that there are so many creative possibilities in vidding, especially with the right software. I often wish I'd done my initial learning on Sony Vegas, or Premiere. It would be wonderful to have some of those techniques in the tool kit. If I ever find myself with time on my hands, I'll head off to climb that particular Everest. ...One day! *g*
Happy vidding!
no subject
Date: 2021-07-06 08:57 am (UTC)I chat with Ollie (TinTurtle) often and know they use FlowBlade for Linux, but don't think I've ever chatted programs with you.
I started with Premiere ages ago, but until a few years ago, I never had/modded a PC specifically for video editing. My specs were: Do I have enough storage for screengrabs and text documents? Great! Video always chocked on my machines.
Sad times, I messed up my PC last year and lost the Premiere installation, so I have three or four vids that I can't open the project files for anymore. No great loss, they're early vids. I'd just start from scratch if I ever needed to re-edit them.
I do agree on SVP. I've known about that editor and the huge community and resources available for SVP forever and didn't make the switch because I already owned Premiere and it worked and I knew how to use it. I regret that decision on occasion when I see some of the gorgeous vids coming out of the SVP community today.
no subject
Date: 2021-07-16 02:01 pm (UTC)Eventually, I got a more powerful laptop of my own (which still time-shares with other purposes and tasks) but has adequate speed and memory. As a complete vidding newbie, I was originally pointed towards VideoStudio ProX and, due to time restraints, that's where I've stayed.
Oh no! ...Such a shame to lose vids due to technical glitches. Sorry to hear some fell through the cracks.
It would be nice to have better aesthetic control with those more professional programs, but it's a dream for me, right now. :D