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eruthrosI made three Frontera Verde vids for bironic for festivids! bironic had some really amazing prompts for the source, which I hadn't seen, so I watched it after festivids assignments went out.
Frontera Verde is a really interesting canon, both structurally - one of the main characters is found dead in the first episode - and tonally. I ended up wanting to make vids for three ofbironic's prompts in three pretty different genres! I don't think there's a single clip that's in all three, except for a particularly lush jungle scene that was a very helpful clip for overlays.
The three vids are:
yesterday, today, and tomorrow
song: thick as thieves by Amelia
summary: The chiricsanango, or yesterday today and tomorrow plant, has color-changing flowers that last for just three days: yesterday they were purple, today they are lavender, tomorrow they will be white, and then they will be gone.
Download: 178 MB on mediafire or 99 MB on mediafire
AO3 Link: yesterday, today, and tomorrow on the AO3
Notes: So, I went into Frontera Verde withbironic's prompts in mind, which meant I was waiting for the OT3 that might have to be constructed! Ushe appears consistently throughout the show, but she doesn't meet Aura and Joaquín until almost the end of the show. Their relationship is constrained by just a few flashbacks. But, like, okay, they are an OT3 who live together and raise Helena together, this is essentially canon even if it's only in like five scenes, I will not be convinced otherwise.
After I watched the show I thought about the limited footage and what I could do with it for an OT3 and declared tothingswithwings that I needed a song that was about 1:30. She sorted her music files by length and, hello, this lovely little Amelia song! I've vidded Amelia before - in this Syberia vid to Dolores, also featuring flashbacks and a nostalgic past - and their various bossa nova background rhythms are super viddable and fun to work with. Also they are just slightly mournful all the time, which is a good viding mood. Highly recommended as an artist!
The hardest call here was whether to end the vid with the flashback tragedies, or just to give them this brief shining moment of happiness and raising a baby together. I went with the happiness-cut-to-future-Helena, but gave it a title about the temporary nature of the relationship. (The title is from searching for the flower frequently mentioned on the show, which was in the subtitles as chiric anego? Which I couldn't find when I searched, but thought it might have been the chiricsanango.)
Streaming Version:
uyariy nisqayki (listen and I'll tell you)
song: Tijeras by Renata Flores
summary: No one hears what I'm saying
So I say: I will scream
content notes: nazi symbols (the bad guy does a nazi salute while wearing a nazi uniform), murdered woman, violence against women, depictions of police
Download link: 263 MB on mediafire or 143 MB on mediafire
Subtitle download links: Original (Runasimi and Spanish) or English
AO3 link: uyariy nisqayki on the AO3
Notes on the song Tijeras:
Renata Flores wrote this song as a protest against femicides; the lyrics are in Runasimi and Spanish. It's about women speaking up, being resilient, and coming together to work against injustice. You can read more about Renata Flores at Renata Flores & Her Music Are An Act of Indigenous Resistance. Her first album is coming out soon! Also her new song is great and there's a phone game for it!
The English translation is by me, via the Spanish translation that is included in this article: Renata Flores canta contra los feminicidios a ritmo de danza de Tijeras and with the assistance of a Runasimi dictionary when the Spanish was ambiguous.
Tijeras means scissors; the song is in the rhythm of a scissors dance. But it didn't really make sense as a title for this vid.
Vidder notes: Sooooo this was the hard one. I wanted this vid to draw out some of the plot about investigation and tie it to the relationship between Helena and Ushe through time, and balancing those two things while trying to create a coherent structure was difficult!
I had the song before I watched the show - I knew that the show featured indigenous characters and femicide, so I listened to some playlists of indigenous music from South America while I was working. The indigenous language spoken on the show is a Witotoan language, but all the Witotoan music I could find was, like, Smithsonian Folkways recordings with no context and no translation. Which I was not comfortable with. So I listened to some Runasimi music as well and found Renata Flores and listened to all of her music!
I found a Spanish translation of the song and decided it was just right for the vid, but then I had to translate it. I did this in a spreadsheet, with the Runasimi and the Spanish and then my English version, so that I could keep track of how the lyrics corresponded for subtitling. Then I started my project in Premiere by subtitling the original lyrics and then duplicating that track and subbing the English subtitles into each slot.
I then had a crisis of confidence about the song right as I started making the vid - because it's about femicides specifically but I was going to need to talk about a bunch of other violence, because Runasimi isn't largely spoken in the amazon, because it would be Helena's POV first and not Ushe's etc - but I talked myself down.
I vidded this paying attention to the English translation but switching it on and off as necessary. This was fun and also made it way, way easier to vid a language I don't speak! Highly recommended. The one downside here was that I thought the lyrics as written out cut in some awkward places compared to the actual lyrics of the song, because of lines of lyrics running into each other, but I didn't have enough of a sense of Runasimi grammar to be able to restructure where the lines broke, which I would have done for an English language vid.
streaming version:
lyrics: original
Manan pipas qawanchu manan imatapas
Atinichu ruwayta, rimayta munani
Qhaparispanmi, tukuy runa
Manan uyarikunchu rimasqayta
Qinaspa nini: qhaparisaqmi
Uyariy nisqayki
Uyariy nisqayki
Qawani qanayman tutapi kasqaypi
Qawani achkita qinaptin uyarini
Qatiy nisqanta
Manan pipas hawanchu
Manan imatapas atinichu ruwayta
rimayta munani
Qhaparispanmi, tukuy runa
Manan uyarinkuchu rimasqayta
Qinaspa nini: qhaparisaqmi tukuy kallpaywan
Ima?
Manan pipas qawanchu manan imatapas
Atinichu ruwayta, rimayta munani
Qhaparispanmi, tukuy runa
Manan uyarikunchu rimasqayta
Qinaspa nini: qhaparisaqmi
Icha qapariyta sumaqta takisaq
Chaynatan uyarinqaku runakuna
Llakisqa qawani aswan nanayta
Llulla runakuna
Manan allinta ruaspa
Ñuqanchiq quykunchik atiy ruasqayninta
Waytata rantispa?
Uyariy nisqayki
Uyariy nisqayki
Manchakuychu rimayta
Manchakuychu rimayta
Mírame, ahora soy más fuerte
Mírame, ya no tengo miedo
Ahora sí, tengo esperanza
Warmikuna… quñusqa kasun
lyrics (English):
No one sees anything
I can't speak, I want to speak
The people are so loud
No one hears what I'm saying
So I say: I will scream
Listen and I'll tell you
Listen and I'll tell you
I see, standing up in the dark
I see the light, then I listen
"Follow," it says
No one sees
I can't do anything
I want to speak
The people are so loud
No one hears what I'm saying
So I say: I will scream with all my strength
What?
No one sees anything
I can't speak, I want to speak
The people are so loud
No one hears what I'm saying
So I say: I will scream
Maybe I'll scream in a beautiful song
And then people will listen
I see with sorrow, so much pain
Deceitful people
Don't do good things
We gave them the power
Buying flowers?
Listen and I'll tell you
Listen and I'll tell you
Don't be afraid to speak
Don't be afraid to speak
See me, I'm stronger now
See me, I'm no longer afraid
Finally I have hope
Women, let's unite.
Mother Jungle
audio: by me; individual effects are from the BBC Sound Archive and Motion Array
summary: It is the heart of the jungle that makes roots that spread below the ground.
content notes: Nazi symbols (a swastika), audio triggers (loud abrupt noises, heartbeat)
Download: 165 MB on mediafire or 90 MB on mediafire
AO3 Link: Mother Jungle on the AO3
Notes:
Me, watching the first episode of Frontera Verde: omg I would love to make a vid from the perspective of the jungle! Look at how the roots swallow Yua here! Cool and creepy! Great suggestionbironic!
Show: glad you liked it, we'll never do it again
Me, after watching the last episode of Frontera Verde: wtf I can't believe that was the only moment of jungle activeness that we got and everything else was either a shot of trees OR a secret inner jungle world with no trees in it.
SO then I had to think through how to give the jungle a POV when I had, like, six shots of the jungle doing something: the glowing roots (still super annoyed Ushe never touched them), the glowing branches, and the roots swallowing Yua. I thought about it a lot and concluded that the only way to do this would be to set up the evil threat to the jungle, and then try to convey a sense that the jungle reached out to these three people who could then do some active things to end the threat. I focused a lot on their hands, and I flipped a lot of this footage so that instead of people looking up the trees seemed to look down.
I had a ton of fun doing the audio editing! Once I had the structure, I knew I needed some steady sound that I could speed up and slow down for anxious threats. I considered footsteps (too human and embodied), breathing (I couldn't find what I needed, which would be a sort of running gasping breathing; everything sounded kinda fake) before I settled on the heartbeat that I should've thought of at the beginning because the jungle is literally described as the heart and the villains steal a heart to get into it. So like. Better late than never.
The bird, cicada, frog, and background rainforest noises are from BBC Sound Effects; I searched for rainforest habitats and found some great audio. Because they index well, I can say that the bird species include amazon kingfisher, russet-backed oropendola, yellow-rumped cacique, screaming piha, plumbeous pigeon, as well as some mixed flocks!
The other sound effects are from Motion Array; I listened to many heartbeats and lots of breathing to find ones that seemed more distant and inhuman and then added some additional reverb / echo as needed. The chainsaw was the first the-jungle-is-in-danger sound I thought of, when I was thinking through the structure, because it was so straightforward! Then I had to find decent fire sounds and also decide what Nazis sounded like (the noise is a volcano caldera but I tried some other ominous noises before I landed there).
Vidding to a beat that you can speed up or slow down at will was magical, at one point whenthingswithwings was betaing she told me that the heartbeat slowed down too early and I just looked at it, whacked out a section, sped it up, and slid the other effects on over. MAGIC.
Hilariously this vid gave me anxiety – once I put the first clip on the timeline I vidded it super fast, like in a couple hours, because I'd been thinking about it so much that I was all set up structurally. But the part with the heartbeat speeding up makes my heartbeat speed up! Especially when I was working through that section – fast heartbeat stop to consider cut fast heartbeat pause. Whoops.
Streaming version:
bironic for festivids! bironic had some really amazing prompts for the source, which I hadn't seen, so I watched it after festivids assignments went out. Frontera Verde is a really interesting canon, both structurally - one of the main characters is found dead in the first episode - and tonally. I ended up wanting to make vids for three of
bironic's prompts in three pretty different genres! I don't think there's a single clip that's in all three, except for a particularly lush jungle scene that was a very helpful clip for overlays.The three vids are:
yesterday, today, and tomorrow
song: thick as thieves by Amelia
summary: The chiricsanango, or yesterday today and tomorrow plant, has color-changing flowers that last for just three days: yesterday they were purple, today they are lavender, tomorrow they will be white, and then they will be gone.
Download: 178 MB on mediafire or 99 MB on mediafire
AO3 Link: yesterday, today, and tomorrow on the AO3
Notes: So, I went into Frontera Verde with
bironic's prompts in mind, which meant I was waiting for the OT3 that might have to be constructed! Ushe appears consistently throughout the show, but she doesn't meet Aura and Joaquín until almost the end of the show. Their relationship is constrained by just a few flashbacks. But, like, okay, they are an OT3 who live together and raise Helena together, this is essentially canon even if it's only in like five scenes, I will not be convinced otherwise. After I watched the show I thought about the limited footage and what I could do with it for an OT3 and declared to
thingswithwings that I needed a song that was about 1:30. She sorted her music files by length and, hello, this lovely little Amelia song! I've vidded Amelia before - in this Syberia vid to Dolores, also featuring flashbacks and a nostalgic past - and their various bossa nova background rhythms are super viddable and fun to work with. Also they are just slightly mournful all the time, which is a good viding mood. Highly recommended as an artist! The hardest call here was whether to end the vid with the flashback tragedies, or just to give them this brief shining moment of happiness and raising a baby together. I went with the happiness-cut-to-future-Helena, but gave it a title about the temporary nature of the relationship. (The title is from searching for the flower frequently mentioned on the show, which was in the subtitles as chiric anego? Which I couldn't find when I searched, but thought it might have been the chiricsanango.)
Streaming Version:
uyariy nisqayki (listen and I'll tell you)
song: Tijeras by Renata Flores
summary: No one hears what I'm saying
So I say: I will scream
content notes: nazi symbols (the bad guy does a nazi salute while wearing a nazi uniform), murdered woman, violence against women, depictions of police
Download link: 263 MB on mediafire or 143 MB on mediafire
Subtitle download links: Original (Runasimi and Spanish) or English
AO3 link: uyariy nisqayki on the AO3
Notes on the song Tijeras:
Renata Flores wrote this song as a protest against femicides; the lyrics are in Runasimi and Spanish. It's about women speaking up, being resilient, and coming together to work against injustice. You can read more about Renata Flores at Renata Flores & Her Music Are An Act of Indigenous Resistance. Her first album is coming out soon! Also her new song is great and there's a phone game for it!
The English translation is by me, via the Spanish translation that is included in this article: Renata Flores canta contra los feminicidios a ritmo de danza de Tijeras and with the assistance of a Runasimi dictionary when the Spanish was ambiguous.
Tijeras means scissors; the song is in the rhythm of a scissors dance. But it didn't really make sense as a title for this vid.
Vidder notes: Sooooo this was the hard one. I wanted this vid to draw out some of the plot about investigation and tie it to the relationship between Helena and Ushe through time, and balancing those two things while trying to create a coherent structure was difficult!
I had the song before I watched the show - I knew that the show featured indigenous characters and femicide, so I listened to some playlists of indigenous music from South America while I was working. The indigenous language spoken on the show is a Witotoan language, but all the Witotoan music I could find was, like, Smithsonian Folkways recordings with no context and no translation. Which I was not comfortable with. So I listened to some Runasimi music as well and found Renata Flores and listened to all of her music!
I found a Spanish translation of the song and decided it was just right for the vid, but then I had to translate it. I did this in a spreadsheet, with the Runasimi and the Spanish and then my English version, so that I could keep track of how the lyrics corresponded for subtitling. Then I started my project in Premiere by subtitling the original lyrics and then duplicating that track and subbing the English subtitles into each slot.
I then had a crisis of confidence about the song right as I started making the vid - because it's about femicides specifically but I was going to need to talk about a bunch of other violence, because Runasimi isn't largely spoken in the amazon, because it would be Helena's POV first and not Ushe's etc - but I talked myself down.
I vidded this paying attention to the English translation but switching it on and off as necessary. This was fun and also made it way, way easier to vid a language I don't speak! Highly recommended. The one downside here was that I thought the lyrics as written out cut in some awkward places compared to the actual lyrics of the song, because of lines of lyrics running into each other, but I didn't have enough of a sense of Runasimi grammar to be able to restructure where the lines broke, which I would have done for an English language vid.
streaming version:
lyrics: original
Manan pipas qawanchu manan imatapas
Atinichu ruwayta, rimayta munani
Qhaparispanmi, tukuy runa
Manan uyarikunchu rimasqayta
Qinaspa nini: qhaparisaqmi
Uyariy nisqayki
Uyariy nisqayki
Qawani qanayman tutapi kasqaypi
Qawani achkita qinaptin uyarini
Qatiy nisqanta
Manan pipas hawanchu
Manan imatapas atinichu ruwayta
rimayta munani
Qhaparispanmi, tukuy runa
Manan uyarinkuchu rimasqayta
Qinaspa nini: qhaparisaqmi tukuy kallpaywan
Ima?
Manan pipas qawanchu manan imatapas
Atinichu ruwayta, rimayta munani
Qhaparispanmi, tukuy runa
Manan uyarikunchu rimasqayta
Qinaspa nini: qhaparisaqmi
Icha qapariyta sumaqta takisaq
Chaynatan uyarinqaku runakuna
Llakisqa qawani aswan nanayta
Llulla runakuna
Manan allinta ruaspa
Ñuqanchiq quykunchik atiy ruasqayninta
Waytata rantispa?
Uyariy nisqayki
Uyariy nisqayki
Manchakuychu rimayta
Manchakuychu rimayta
Mírame, ahora soy más fuerte
Mírame, ya no tengo miedo
Ahora sí, tengo esperanza
Warmikuna… quñusqa kasun
lyrics (English):
No one sees anything
I can't speak, I want to speak
The people are so loud
No one hears what I'm saying
So I say: I will scream
Listen and I'll tell you
Listen and I'll tell you
I see, standing up in the dark
I see the light, then I listen
"Follow," it says
No one sees
I can't do anything
I want to speak
The people are so loud
No one hears what I'm saying
So I say: I will scream with all my strength
What?
No one sees anything
I can't speak, I want to speak
The people are so loud
No one hears what I'm saying
So I say: I will scream
Maybe I'll scream in a beautiful song
And then people will listen
I see with sorrow, so much pain
Deceitful people
Don't do good things
We gave them the power
Buying flowers?
Listen and I'll tell you
Listen and I'll tell you
Don't be afraid to speak
Don't be afraid to speak
See me, I'm stronger now
See me, I'm no longer afraid
Finally I have hope
Women, let's unite.
Mother Jungle
audio: by me; individual effects are from the BBC Sound Archive and Motion Array
summary: It is the heart of the jungle that makes roots that spread below the ground.
content notes: Nazi symbols (a swastika), audio triggers (loud abrupt noises, heartbeat)
Download: 165 MB on mediafire or 90 MB on mediafire
AO3 Link: Mother Jungle on the AO3
Notes:
Me, watching the first episode of Frontera Verde: omg I would love to make a vid from the perspective of the jungle! Look at how the roots swallow Yua here! Cool and creepy! Great suggestion
bironic!Show: glad you liked it, we'll never do it again
Me, after watching the last episode of Frontera Verde: wtf I can't believe that was the only moment of jungle activeness that we got and everything else was either a shot of trees OR a secret inner jungle world with no trees in it.
SO then I had to think through how to give the jungle a POV when I had, like, six shots of the jungle doing something: the glowing roots (still super annoyed Ushe never touched them), the glowing branches, and the roots swallowing Yua. I thought about it a lot and concluded that the only way to do this would be to set up the evil threat to the jungle, and then try to convey a sense that the jungle reached out to these three people who could then do some active things to end the threat. I focused a lot on their hands, and I flipped a lot of this footage so that instead of people looking up the trees seemed to look down.
I had a ton of fun doing the audio editing! Once I had the structure, I knew I needed some steady sound that I could speed up and slow down for anxious threats. I considered footsteps (too human and embodied), breathing (I couldn't find what I needed, which would be a sort of running gasping breathing; everything sounded kinda fake) before I settled on the heartbeat that I should've thought of at the beginning because the jungle is literally described as the heart and the villains steal a heart to get into it. So like. Better late than never.
The bird, cicada, frog, and background rainforest noises are from BBC Sound Effects; I searched for rainforest habitats and found some great audio. Because they index well, I can say that the bird species include amazon kingfisher, russet-backed oropendola, yellow-rumped cacique, screaming piha, plumbeous pigeon, as well as some mixed flocks!
The other sound effects are from Motion Array; I listened to many heartbeats and lots of breathing to find ones that seemed more distant and inhuman and then added some additional reverb / echo as needed. The chainsaw was the first the-jungle-is-in-danger sound I thought of, when I was thinking through the structure, because it was so straightforward! Then I had to find decent fire sounds and also decide what Nazis sounded like (the noise is a volcano caldera but I tried some other ominous noises before I landed there).
Vidding to a beat that you can speed up or slow down at will was magical, at one point when
thingswithwings was betaing she told me that the heartbeat slowed down too early and I just looked at it, whacked out a section, sped it up, and slid the other effects on over. MAGIC. Hilariously this vid gave me anxiety – once I put the first clip on the timeline I vidded it super fast, like in a couple hours, because I'd been thinking about it so much that I was all set up structurally. But the part with the heartbeat speeding up makes my heartbeat speed up! Especially when I was working through that section – fast heartbeat stop to consider cut fast heartbeat pause. Whoops.
Streaming version:
no subject
Date: 2021-02-06 11:13 pm (UTC)Thanks to your content notes, I won’t be watching the vids themselves. So double thanks for providing this insight into the process.
no subject
Date: 2021-02-07 02:30 am (UTC)