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jinkyoI'm not (was not) a big MCU viewer. I'd seen Iron Man 1 for the novelty of it, then Iron Man 2 because I enjoyed the first and for Mickey Rourke (fresh off The Wrestler). I'd also seen Thor 1 because Ray Stevenson. Volstagg was mostly in the visually dark Act 1, disappointing.
I figured out most of the following films through social media and as a confirmed contrarian, found it all overwhelming and off-putting. Cross country airplane travel proved to be a good way to catch up on the films which is where I saw Age of Ultron. Not terrible, not great, watching on an airplane didn't help. Still, I like Artificial Sentient Intelligence characters bunches so that was one relatable-to-me hook into the MCU. Despite that germ of interest, I lived a relatively MCU-free life for many, many years - until WandaVision.
The 50's sitcom visual of the ads piqued my interest. I like old-timey TV. I also liked the Vision character, and there seemed to be a Black lead. The deciding factor was that we still had a paid Disney+ subscription in the house so the watching would be hassle-free.
I enjoyed WandaVision to no end! This show had fantasy, mystery, shady government agencies, horror, magic, whimsically beautiful cinematography, fun side characters, and anchoring it all - Wanda!
From there I went into a deep dive of the MCU catalog and continued to enjoy myself. (To date, I've watched everything except the Captain America stand-alones. I was saving that for TFAWS, but I never got around to watching that. I have seen one episode of Loki so far). MCU is not that bad, I thought, and that was the stopping point of my fannish engagement. I don't want to write about these cats, nor vid them. I don't care enough about this IP and there are already TONS of things for this out there.
Sometime in April, I was living life and indulging an earworm, "Pull Out the Pin" from The Dreaming by Kate Bush. I let the album play out. Bopping along to the awesome drums of "Get out of My House", I was suddenly struck by the lyrics.
Hang on, what is this song about?!
Google rabbit hole time! Bush said (or maybe she didn't?) that she was influenced by The Shining when she wrote it. So, it's a haunted house maybe, but then there's a very clear lyrical story about this being a real house that some man is trying to enter, so maybe it's a relationship gone wrong song. But THE CONCIERGE! Who is the concierge, because that's a whole different person, to my ear, to the one with the key and the cleaning and washing.
What a mixed-up song this was. LOL! Imagine trying to vid this - you'd need a super crazy source. Creepy like The Shining, and definitely female-centered, this is a woman's story. Impossible!
Hang on - what about that crazy creepy show about the witch - the one where the traumatized woman with superpowers actively tried to keep people out of her house, while at the same time, stomping her muddy feet all inside the houses of non-consenting innocents?
Holy shit!
Guess I'm cutting a vid.
Audio Edit
"Get Out Of My House" is a 5 1/2 minute sonic and lyrical rollercoaster. It's an epic album-ending track. It also has a second story inside, the confrontation between the woman and the man. Great stuff, but not a story I want to vid. I wanted all of the first half of the song, her story. I also wanted the chanting, from the end of the song, and lazily, wanted the built-in fade-out of the ending.
In the original, the song transitions from her story with this plaintive wail which I definitely wanted, but her wail eases right into the man's lyrics, which slide under hers. The best cutting point turned out to be the very start of the chant section, but the chant section was longer than I wanted. I could either play the whole section through to preserve the original fade-out or cut the chants down and build my own fade-out. It's hard to explain, but the looong fade-out is beautiful and anything that I'd have to build would never be that good.
The deciding factor on cutting the chants short was that I did not have enough story to fill the original length. The end of this vid would be problematic for most of the edit, but I already felt like I didn't want to dwell too long on the finale. The meat of the story was in the center, the end just needed a short wrap-up. So, I cut the chants short and then layered a section of the "Get out of my house" with the plaintive wail underneath, tried my best, smoothed fade-out, and called it a day.
I spent a day or so in audio edit with the final edited WAV exported on 4/17/2021.
Footage Fuckery
I used 9 episodes of WandaVision and some scene packs initially but later went back to clip my own Wanda and Vision scenes from the movies. Usually, Da Vinci Resolves works with whatever footage I throw at it, these Wanda files, it hated. HATED! The files froze up at every SFX heavy shot, the program froze and crashed constantly. Resolve hated these files!!
This led to a long long time away from actively editing to figuring out how to make the files usable!
1. These are MP4 files that, despite the warnings, usually work fine. Still, don't be stubborn, just convert them to DNxHD, the format Resolve loves best, and move on. Resolve crashed on every single multi-hour transcode session. I have 9 episodes and 4 movies and I am hitting a dead-end.
2. Ok, maybe every single one of these files is corrupted and that's why I can't convert them. Cool. I'll use VLC to correct and convert them. This also takes days and Resolve continues to crash with this new set of files.
3. Fuck, what other video tools do I have installed on this machine?
- My Adobe Encoder is too old to have the DNxHD output setting and none of the other options look ideal.
- I don't want to learn Handbrake.
- I don't even understand what this GitHub FFmpeg stuff is.
- What was that software I used to submit DVD files to a Con last year, would that work? (a while later after locating and launching Llamaenc2) . Yeah, fuck this too, I don't understand these settings and I don't want to learn it!
- What is that super old software that I used to use for repair and convert? MPEG Streamclip! Another few days lost in converting a new batch of files.
After nearly 2 weeks lost to research, converting, updating Resolve to the most recent 16 branch, learning how to switch source folders so that I'd retain the clips I'd already made, I finally had a stable timeline to work on. I was also now about a week away from the deadline on this vid and gave serious thought to quitting in favor of something I could edit quickly using proven and already clipped sources.
Video Edit
4/29/2021 The earliest draft on my computer is Draft 3. I'm sure there's a 1 and 2 that I either purged, but more likely, named something weird and now can't find.
I don't know what the open looks like yet. I have a vague idea that it's Wanda traveling to Westview for the first time but, eh. I'm more interested in the start of the lyrics and slammed doors, creepy noises, elevators, and cat hackles. I know this part is all lyric matches so this is where I start building.
I haven't looked at these drafts in months, so I'm especially interested in seeing how the vid grew out of a few sections that I locked in from the start. Also, sections that were problems at the start remained problematic until I stopped work on the vid.
- Hackles on the cat - I would play with the in and out points on this a bit, but basically, it's locked.
- Bee Keeper/No - I see this shifts position over the drafts, but basically locked in.
- "Get out of my house!"
- "Meeeeee" = The Scarlet Witch. Another clip that got frame shifted a few times and finally settled back into its near original position.
- Scarlet witch transition into the dismantling of Westview + residents. The final is so close to the original sequence. One change that I regret, but didn't have time to solve is that in a lost Draft 1 or 2, I stay on the residents longer and all that chanting plays underneath them. It looked and sounded great, but I ended up trimming this which threw that residents+chants off slightly.
- Vishawn! Everything about this meme amused me and I wanted him in the vid - and he's in the vid for a very long time until I finally admit that the shot doesn't work for this particular vid. Sad times.
- WHO is the concierge?!
- "Full of, full of fight!" - Spoiler, I never end up solving this sequence to my complete satisfaction.
5/2/2021, Draft 7 - I've firmed up the beginning more. This is all pre-Westview, a recitation of all Wanda's trauma which led her to reanimate her dead lover and enslave a whole ass town out of grief. Knowing is half the battle.
There are many more clips on the timeline now. Looking back, I was editing clip-to-clip flow. I still don't have a clear idea of what the story of this middle section is. I know the ingredients but not the order to mix them yet.
- Wanda as the house/ SWORD as the stranger
- Wanda Maximoff as the house/Scarlett Witch as the (she was there all along) stranger
- Residents as the house/Wanda as the stranger
- The Concierge is Wanda's subconscious, the TV ads
5/5/2021 Draft 12 Proto titles!, and what looks like an attempt to match the beginning and end shots. Mucking about with this opening sequence again.
- Nope, Wanda is the concierge. Wanda is all of this. Figuring this out was a turning point to scripting the rest of the vid.
- Vishawn is still in the cut, along with a great "Wanda exhaling against the door" shot that sadly got cut because it got moved, then lost, during a timeline clean-up. I loved that shot. A great shot of the twins is still intact here but won't make it to the final.
- The sequence leading up to "Get out of my house!" is stronger in these early drafts. I was editing to the keyboards sounds in the music. In hindsight, that eerie sound plus the "fuzziness" of the Westview barrier shots works much better than the "tick-tock"/metronome percussion sound I started editing to later in the process. Ah, can't win them all.
5/6/2021 Draft 21 The VidUKon deadline is approaching and I'm going to have to leave a lot of problems unsolved if I want to get this vid finished in time. The middle looks solid but needs work. The end is still a mess. The beginning is still a loose mess, but I need to start finalizing things.
- Shaped the beginning into something that I could live with should I run out of time to revisit it.
- Opening title screen is also starting to take shape.
- Final shot locked in
5/7/2021 Draft 27F The 11:59PM deadline submission file. I didn't solve all of my problem sequences and there are some graceless clip transitions that make me grimace, but on the whole, the for real for real, I fucking LOVE this video! I didn't exactly know what this would look and sound like at the beginning of the journey, but here with a finished vid, it looks okay, it brings me great joy.
:D Of course, I did go back and try to solve some lingering issues. My thought was, well, I'm 99% OK with draft 27, but I know some specific things I want to change so I'll do that and publish the Final-Final version after the premieres vidshow.
5/12/2021 Draft 29F I made some changes, did not solve the most glaring issue (to my eyes) and in the end, realized this version gave me no more or less joy than the version I'd submitted. It's cut, it exists, and if you've read all the way through this write-up, you've also seen it. Looking back, I'd lived in this vid creation space for a long time and was burnt out on it.
When I finally got to share it with the world, I was a bit overwhelmed by the reaction, as in, I don't vid BIG franchises or trending canons. "Get Out Of My House" was a pleasant change in that respect, the "meeting viewers where they are" aspect. It is nice to have an audience.
Some final takeaways from this project were:
- I love audio editing
- I got to utilize some of the new skills I learned from Vexercise, especially lightbuilding
- The unforced goodness of the perfect song married to the perfect visuals. I tend to be a song-first editor and will make the visuals fit my song story from there. With this vid, the song did so much heavy lifting which freed me up to think about other parts of the build.
- The aspect ratio changes of the source footage and the varied color gradings weren't ideal, but solving those particular problems -after dealing with the file conversions- was so low on my list that, aside from time spent thinking about how I might solve it, I didn't waste much time on executing any fixes.
- It's probably time to start taking my YouTube thumbnail game more seriously.
I figured out most of the following films through social media and as a confirmed contrarian, found it all overwhelming and off-putting. Cross country airplane travel proved to be a good way to catch up on the films which is where I saw Age of Ultron. Not terrible, not great, watching on an airplane didn't help. Still, I like Artificial Sentient Intelligence characters bunches so that was one relatable-to-me hook into the MCU. Despite that germ of interest, I lived a relatively MCU-free life for many, many years - until WandaVision.
The 50's sitcom visual of the ads piqued my interest. I like old-timey TV. I also liked the Vision character, and there seemed to be a Black lead. The deciding factor was that we still had a paid Disney+ subscription in the house so the watching would be hassle-free.
I enjoyed WandaVision to no end! This show had fantasy, mystery, shady government agencies, horror, magic, whimsically beautiful cinematography, fun side characters, and anchoring it all - Wanda!
From there I went into a deep dive of the MCU catalog and continued to enjoy myself. (To date, I've watched everything except the Captain America stand-alones. I was saving that for TFAWS, but I never got around to watching that. I have seen one episode of Loki so far). MCU is not that bad, I thought, and that was the stopping point of my fannish engagement. I don't want to write about these cats, nor vid them. I don't care enough about this IP and there are already TONS of things for this out there.
Sometime in April, I was living life and indulging an earworm, "Pull Out the Pin" from The Dreaming by Kate Bush. I let the album play out. Bopping along to the awesome drums of "Get out of My House", I was suddenly struck by the lyrics.
Hang on, what is this song about?!
Google rabbit hole time! Bush said (or maybe she didn't?) that she was influenced by The Shining when she wrote it. So, it's a haunted house maybe, but then there's a very clear lyrical story about this being a real house that some man is trying to enter, so maybe it's a relationship gone wrong song. But THE CONCIERGE! Who is the concierge, because that's a whole different person, to my ear, to the one with the key and the cleaning and washing.
What a mixed-up song this was. LOL! Imagine trying to vid this - you'd need a super crazy source. Creepy like The Shining, and definitely female-centered, this is a woman's story. Impossible!
Hang on - what about that crazy creepy show about the witch - the one where the traumatized woman with superpowers actively tried to keep people out of her house, while at the same time, stomping her muddy feet all inside the houses of non-consenting innocents?
Holy shit!
Guess I'm cutting a vid.
Audio Edit
"Get Out Of My House" is a 5 1/2 minute sonic and lyrical rollercoaster. It's an epic album-ending track. It also has a second story inside, the confrontation between the woman and the man. Great stuff, but not a story I want to vid. I wanted all of the first half of the song, her story. I also wanted the chanting, from the end of the song, and lazily, wanted the built-in fade-out of the ending.
In the original, the song transitions from her story with this plaintive wail which I definitely wanted, but her wail eases right into the man's lyrics, which slide under hers. The best cutting point turned out to be the very start of the chant section, but the chant section was longer than I wanted. I could either play the whole section through to preserve the original fade-out or cut the chants down and build my own fade-out. It's hard to explain, but the looong fade-out is beautiful and anything that I'd have to build would never be that good.
The deciding factor on cutting the chants short was that I did not have enough story to fill the original length. The end of this vid would be problematic for most of the edit, but I already felt like I didn't want to dwell too long on the finale. The meat of the story was in the center, the end just needed a short wrap-up. So, I cut the chants short and then layered a section of the "Get out of my house" with the plaintive wail underneath, tried my best, smoothed fade-out, and called it a day.
I spent a day or so in audio edit with the final edited WAV exported on 4/17/2021.
Footage Fuckery
I used 9 episodes of WandaVision and some scene packs initially but later went back to clip my own Wanda and Vision scenes from the movies. Usually, Da Vinci Resolves works with whatever footage I throw at it, these Wanda files, it hated. HATED! The files froze up at every SFX heavy shot, the program froze and crashed constantly. Resolve hated these files!!
This led to a long long time away from actively editing to figuring out how to make the files usable!
1. These are MP4 files that, despite the warnings, usually work fine. Still, don't be stubborn, just convert them to DNxHD, the format Resolve loves best, and move on. Resolve crashed on every single multi-hour transcode session. I have 9 episodes and 4 movies and I am hitting a dead-end.
2. Ok, maybe every single one of these files is corrupted and that's why I can't convert them. Cool. I'll use VLC to correct and convert them. This also takes days and Resolve continues to crash with this new set of files.
3. Fuck, what other video tools do I have installed on this machine?
- My Adobe Encoder is too old to have the DNxHD output setting and none of the other options look ideal.
- I don't want to learn Handbrake.
- I don't even understand what this GitHub FFmpeg stuff is.
- What was that software I used to submit DVD files to a Con last year, would that work? (a while later after locating and launching Llamaenc2) . Yeah, fuck this too, I don't understand these settings and I don't want to learn it!
- What is that super old software that I used to use for repair and convert? MPEG Streamclip! Another few days lost in converting a new batch of files.
After nearly 2 weeks lost to research, converting, updating Resolve to the most recent 16 branch, learning how to switch source folders so that I'd retain the clips I'd already made, I finally had a stable timeline to work on. I was also now about a week away from the deadline on this vid and gave serious thought to quitting in favor of something I could edit quickly using proven and already clipped sources.
Video Edit
4/29/2021 The earliest draft on my computer is Draft 3. I'm sure there's a 1 and 2 that I either purged, but more likely, named something weird and now can't find.
I don't know what the open looks like yet. I have a vague idea that it's Wanda traveling to Westview for the first time but, eh. I'm more interested in the start of the lyrics and slammed doors, creepy noises, elevators, and cat hackles. I know this part is all lyric matches so this is where I start building.
I haven't looked at these drafts in months, so I'm especially interested in seeing how the vid grew out of a few sections that I locked in from the start. Also, sections that were problems at the start remained problematic until I stopped work on the vid.
- Hackles on the cat - I would play with the in and out points on this a bit, but basically, it's locked.
- Bee Keeper/No - I see this shifts position over the drafts, but basically locked in.
- "Get out of my house!"
- "Meeeeee" = The Scarlet Witch. Another clip that got frame shifted a few times and finally settled back into its near original position.
- Scarlet witch transition into the dismantling of Westview + residents. The final is so close to the original sequence. One change that I regret, but didn't have time to solve is that in a lost Draft 1 or 2, I stay on the residents longer and all that chanting plays underneath them. It looked and sounded great, but I ended up trimming this which threw that residents+chants off slightly.
- Vishawn! Everything about this meme amused me and I wanted him in the vid - and he's in the vid for a very long time until I finally admit that the shot doesn't work for this particular vid. Sad times.
- WHO is the concierge?!
- "Full of, full of fight!" - Spoiler, I never end up solving this sequence to my complete satisfaction.
5/2/2021, Draft 7 - I've firmed up the beginning more. This is all pre-Westview, a recitation of all Wanda's trauma which led her to reanimate her dead lover and enslave a whole ass town out of grief. Knowing is half the battle.
There are many more clips on the timeline now. Looking back, I was editing clip-to-clip flow. I still don't have a clear idea of what the story of this middle section is. I know the ingredients but not the order to mix them yet.
- Wanda as the house/ SWORD as the stranger
- Wanda Maximoff as the house/Scarlett Witch as the (she was there all along) stranger
- Residents as the house/Wanda as the stranger
- The Concierge is Wanda's subconscious, the TV ads
5/5/2021 Draft 12 Proto titles!, and what looks like an attempt to match the beginning and end shots. Mucking about with this opening sequence again.
- Nope, Wanda is the concierge. Wanda is all of this. Figuring this out was a turning point to scripting the rest of the vid.
- Vishawn is still in the cut, along with a great "Wanda exhaling against the door" shot that sadly got cut because it got moved, then lost, during a timeline clean-up. I loved that shot. A great shot of the twins is still intact here but won't make it to the final.
- The sequence leading up to "Get out of my house!" is stronger in these early drafts. I was editing to the keyboards sounds in the music. In hindsight, that eerie sound plus the "fuzziness" of the Westview barrier shots works much better than the "tick-tock"/metronome percussion sound I started editing to later in the process. Ah, can't win them all.
5/6/2021 Draft 21 The VidUKon deadline is approaching and I'm going to have to leave a lot of problems unsolved if I want to get this vid finished in time. The middle looks solid but needs work. The end is still a mess. The beginning is still a loose mess, but I need to start finalizing things.
- Shaped the beginning into something that I could live with should I run out of time to revisit it.
- Opening title screen is also starting to take shape.
- Final shot locked in
5/7/2021 Draft 27F The 11:59PM deadline submission file. I didn't solve all of my problem sequences and there are some graceless clip transitions that make me grimace, but on the whole, the for real for real, I fucking LOVE this video! I didn't exactly know what this would look and sound like at the beginning of the journey, but here with a finished vid, it looks okay, it brings me great joy.
:D Of course, I did go back and try to solve some lingering issues. My thought was, well, I'm 99% OK with draft 27, but I know some specific things I want to change so I'll do that and publish the Final-Final version after the premieres vidshow.
5/12/2021 Draft 29F I made some changes, did not solve the most glaring issue (to my eyes) and in the end, realized this version gave me no more or less joy than the version I'd submitted. It's cut, it exists, and if you've read all the way through this write-up, you've also seen it. Looking back, I'd lived in this vid creation space for a long time and was burnt out on it.
When I finally got to share it with the world, I was a bit overwhelmed by the reaction, as in, I don't vid BIG franchises or trending canons. "Get Out Of My House" was a pleasant change in that respect, the "meeting viewers where they are" aspect. It is nice to have an audience.
Some final takeaways from this project were:
- I love audio editing
- I got to utilize some of the new skills I learned from Vexercise, especially lightbuilding
- The unforced goodness of the perfect song married to the perfect visuals. I tend to be a song-first editor and will make the visuals fit my song story from there. With this vid, the song did so much heavy lifting which freed me up to think about other parts of the build.
- The aspect ratio changes of the source footage and the varied color gradings weren't ideal, but solving those particular problems -after dealing with the file conversions- was so low on my list that, aside from time spent thinking about how I might solve it, I didn't waste much time on executing any fixes.
- It's probably time to start taking my YouTube thumbnail game more seriously.
Get Out Of My House
WandaVision (TV)
Content warning for cut cuts, bright light flashes, grief.
VidUKon Premiere 2021
YouTube: https://youtu.be/XwjPuHDrte0
AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/31907746
Dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com/s/qpxm079iux1ejg0/Premiere_JinkyO_GetOutOfMyHouse.mp4?dl=0Content warning for cut cuts, bright light flashes, grief.
VidUKon Premiere 2021
YouTube: https://youtu.be/XwjPuHDrte0
AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/31907746
no subject
Date: 2021-06-24 01:58 pm (UTC)I wanted to see WandaVision, but don't have that particular streaming service. I still want to catch the series sometime, so I'm purposely not paying too much attention to plot details (in order to save some of the mystery).
Your vid ads to my store of WandaVision teasers.
no subject
Date: 2021-06-28 01:42 am (UTC)Grrr! I've got a few Vexercise vidlets left on this year's to-do list. After that, I need to bite the bullet upgrade to Resolve 17. The software is not easily backward compatible so I've been waiting to finish up my lingering things.