Festivids Reveals!

[eruthros]

So somehow I made eight vids for for festivids? They are:

The Green Knight: How Death Comes (dw | ao3) and this is how silly men perish (dw | ao3)
Salt Fat Acid Heat: At Last (dw | ao3)
Kisima Ingitchuna | Never Alone: Song Spirit (dw | ao3)
Breaking Fast: dates for iftar (dw | ao3)
Vampires vs the Bronx: Working Poor (dw | ao3)
Lil Nas X: go high, go low (dw | ao3) and Queen (dw | ao3)

I have never made this many vids in a year, let alone for a single festivids! I don't know what happened - it felt like things just kept lining up just right for me.

making eight festivids:

The Green Knight

I started with two vids for The Green Knight! I watched The Green Knight sometime last fall, and afterwards I immediately said "someone should vid this to How Death Comes, but it's not going to be me." (Spoilers: it was, in fact, going to be me.)

I was interested in the way The Green Knight told what is, in many ways, the exact opposite story of the poem - in the film, Gawain fails every challenge set for him until he takes off the belt for the Green Knight; in the poem, he succeeds in every task except that he wears the belt - which weirdly made it feel more like it was related to other Arthurian legend, in conversation with it, a retelling instead of recap. Also it's a movie in which nothing makes logical sense but everything makes visual sense; it's vibes only in movie form. So when I said "someone should vid this to How Death Comes," part of what I meant was that the film was playing with a lot of the nature/rot/death themes that were so big in so much middle English storytelling, and that I wanted to see it set to to a song that is deeply preoccupied with the nature of death in a similar way. I was dithering around about whether I'd actually make this vid and then absternr had a great request about aesthetics so I had to!

Vidding "How Death Comes" was super fun! I had these vibes-only folders, and I vidded it like "constraints / built universe / live forever" and "nature / rot / death" and then "the AU in which the pursuit of immortality brings tragedy." I usually vid more structurally or narratively so this was a fun exercise in "which building looks most ominous" instead of "which building is important for plot reasons." For the parts in the round, because the song was so consistently paced, every single clip was 9, 13/14, or 18 frames, which was very aesthetically pleasing on the timeline and also meant that I kind of kept clipping to 9 frames for all subsequent projects.

toft helpfully translated the song for me! And thingswithwings helped me get it thematically tight - she is such a great beta because she'll turn to me and say "okay, but like, what's the point?" in addition to "it's off the beat." longwhitecoats also helpfully pointed out that the beginning was confusing and not strongly enough about Gawain.

The fox is stock art - it was included with a set of animated letters I downloaded at some point - which I recolored and resized for the title screen. Because, structurally, for the song to be "how death comes," the moment when Gawain decapitated the Green Knight and the title with the concept had to happen before the song started, which meant no audio for the titles, so I added the little fox to add interest.

I vidded "How Death Comes" simultaneously with "this is how silly men perish," a vid set to the Taskmaster theme song, which turned the discord into a chain of "what?" all the way down as people realized what was happening. Very satisfying. I put a bunch of the silly falling down that was not included in "How Death Comes" into this one. The intro is thanks to twwings again, because she was vidding Taskmaster! So as she was clipping she kept playing me little sections of Greg and Alex audio that I might be able to cut to make work for an intro here. This was for a request from corbae who asked for "himbo Gawain" and I was like "I would be delighted to vid him falling down." I think probably the funniest thing I did making this was lay my clips for the little escalating section at the end down over top of the clips from the actual taskmaster credits so they'd have the same cutting rhythm as the actual credits.

Salt Fat Acid Heat

I posted "How Death Comes" on Christmas (it's a Christmas movie!) and then switched focus to my assignment for feedingonwind, who had a BUNCH of great requests. I had ideas for several of them, but I thought I'd start with what I thought would be the easiest: Salt Fat Acid Heat.

The song for my Salt Fat Acid Heat vid is from twwings; we were talking about vids we were thinking of making, and she suggested "a classic love song, like At Last." I wrote down "a classic love song" but failed to write down "like At Last" and then forgot it, so three weeks later I was like "okay but you also had a specific idea that I've forgotten" and she was able to recall it! So like, 5000 kudos to twwings.

That said, I wrote it down, but then took a detour through (very weird and usually very heterosexual) "wedding first dance song idea" playlists. There was like an hour or two where this vid might've been made to "What a Wonderful World."

I legitimately teared up clipping Salt Fat Acid Heat; it gave me feelings about food and care and craft and community. Dinner parties stress me out but I still wanted that feeling! And the feeling Samin Nosrat brings to food all the time, that care and focus and intention. Also the delight in new flavors and the willingness to eat unprocessed seaweed to see what it tastes like. Delightful.

I really enjoy the canon and I enjoyed making the vid, but I am face blind and I was SO TIRED of faces by the time I finished vidding this! The camera really lingers on faces and expressions and I was just like HOW can a FACE take FIVE SECONDS to HAPPEN? And it meant I was staring at faces a whole bunch and doing frame by frame analysis and trying hard to identify the best moments, which is how a face blind person vids emotions: when does the expression start to happen? What is the shape of the mouth? Faces are work for me.

Kisima Ingitchuna | Never Alone

So because I needed a face break, I took a detour from my next planned vid to pick something animated instead! I considered a bunch of options, but animated source I picked was Kisima Ingitchuna | Never Alone, a video game, which conveniently past me had done some song research for during nominations!

Because the game development was led by the Cook Inlet Tribal Council and based on an Iñupiaq story, I wanted to vid it to an Iñupiaq artist if possible. During nominations, I listened to some indigefi and a documentary and did a bunch of searches for this, but a lot of the music I found was live drum performance with a lot of background noise, or was religious or ceremonial in a way that I didn't want to appropriate. But a link from the documentary got me to Fresh Water, a collaboration between Arlo Hannigan and Bryan Muktoyuk, which I found again in my brainstorming doc. Thanks for writing it down, past me. I listened to the album and considered "at least you're going" because a sidescrolling video game is a story of "you might not get where you wanted to go, but at least you're going." I picked "Song Spirit" in the end, but I cut about 40 seconds from it to make a better arc for the game. (This was kind of a bummer, because I ended up really squished for gameplay footage and couldn't put in some of the time consuming complicated puzzles, which I would have loved to include!) I did toy around with the idea of a soundtrack mashup (sounded difficult) or a sort of icy-sounding instrumental, though.

My footage was mostly 1080p 60fps (for the gameplay), but I vidded it at 720p (so I could cut out all the hardcoded subtitles except where they were relevant - the whole game narration is in Iñupiaq with English subs) and in a 30fps sequence (so my computer wouldn't hate me). I used the 60fps footage a bit when I needed an effect or something to look smoother, though.

I did want to vid the cultural insights from the game, but they were weirdly frame blended in the game itself. I looked for them on youtube and every single uploaded version was frame blended the same way, so I was prepared to just live with it, and then when I was looking for behind the scenes footage I found almost all of them on the Never Alone vimeo in the correct frame rate! So I reclipped them all and told Premiere to interpret them as 30fps, and that's why there are no subtitles and no frame blending for that section of the vid. I also clipped the trailer from the official vimeo, which is where I got the opening text of the vid and also where I got the shot of a tree waking up while Nuna is standing on the ground and could see it, which I think was actually not a valid thing you could do in the game by launch day (Nuna was always standing on a branch when it woke up in the game).

Because I had that opening shot but no audio for it, I grabbed some wind sound effects and faded them into the song. I also looked for the font to match for my titles at the end, which was pretty easy because it was the first hit for "Never Alone font" so I didn't even have to use a font-identifier.

Vidding the gameplay was a lot of fun and I enjoyed playing around with all of the puzzles and environments, but I had a hilarious problem which was that I couldn't do the fox boy spirit before I hit that cutscene in the vid! So I wanted to do more mix and matching on the environments and backgrounds but I was thwarted by the hovering fox boy spirit being very visible in the frame, and I ended up vidding a lot more sequentially than I'd planned to. I also had a lot of fun pairing the scrimshaw-style animation of the story, the video game cutscenes, and the actual gameplay so that they seemed balanced; most of the story happened in scrimshaw and I didn't want it to overwhelm the gameplay (especially because littlecatk specifically asked for something that captured the feel of the gameplay). So many crossfades to connect one style of footage to another.

I didn't realize I'd vidded two fox companions until someone commented on it after festivids go live.

I'm really proud of this one!

Breaking Fast

After I finished "Song Spirit," I was determined to vid Breaking Fast, which I'd watched in Novemberish based on growlery's dear festividder letter. It's a super charming romcom that's about food and community - it's a romance during Ramadan - but also part of the community feeling in it is calling the main character (Mo) on his shit. Mo starts out the movie pretty judgemental, and he has to learn and grow not just for the sake of his romantic relationship (with Kal) but also for his friendships (with Sam and later Hassan).

I probably spent most of December periodically turning to twwings and saying "I think it would be a great vid if I could just find a song for it!" A lot of love songs don't have room for growth and change in them, and they also don't have room for friends. I really didn't want an "omg otp" song, especially because growlery had specifically asked for something that included the friendships. I started listening to random people's playlists of short instrumental pieces while I worked (no luck), playlists of music by queer arabic people (no luck), the entire catalog of Mashrou' Leila (which didn't work and I knew it wouldn't work in advance and yet I did it anyway), and kept striking out. But! After I finished Song Spirit, I did my desultory poking-at-playlists thing to see if anything new would shake out, and one of the playlist creators had added a song by Clarissa Bitar, who I'd never heard of. And she had a whole album of oud music of just about the right length! I listened to some interviews with Clarissa Bitar to learn more about the music and fell in love with "Al Mizan," a song partly about her partner's dabke dancing. It didn't work out for the vid structurally, though, and I picked "Leila" instead. Then I had about 24 hours of "wait, no, it won't work, it's too mournful," wasted a bunch more time, and ended up back at "Leila" again.

Once I got started on the actual vidding instead of the angsting about a song, this was super fast! The movie is really good at visual clues to emotion so I could vid a breakup in like "one guy leaves, hands clasped, sadness," and it's really good at beautiful food as well. My notes were all like "sad violin: theme X" which is how I structured the vid, but it meant I didn't have quiiiite enough room for Mo's reconciliation with Hassan - just with Sam - because I couldn't move Sam any earlier, he needed to enter on the happy transition!

I wanted to name it something different than the song, to make the themes clearer, so I worked through a bunch of different ideas before landing on "dates for iftar."

I had dates in the house but I failed to eat any while making this vid, so mistakes were made.

Lil Nas X (Part 1)

I definitely wanted to vid Lil Nas X for festivids! This is part of why I wanted to get a Salt Fat Acid Heat vid done early - so that I could vid this for feedingonwind without stress.

I got started early with songs - "Go High, Go Low" was on my list of cool songs for vidding, and I edited it for this purpose in December planning on making a Lil Nas X vid! I also considered another song from my cool vid songs list, Ndidi O's "Call Me Queen," and I loved the choruses but rejected it because it's super gendered and it felt weird. The very next week, the algorithm said "hey you know what else would go on this playlist? Toddrick Hall's Queen." So I snagged that also and edited it down (the original is 4:04!) and dithered about which one I'd vid a bunch. (srs or shiny? srs or shiny???)

This would be my third festivids making an rpf vid, after Janelle Monáe and Carrie Fisher, both of whom I ended up making two vids about. The thing about vidding an rpf fandom for festivids is that it will expand to take up any amount of time you have, which is why I did my treats first! If I'd started with Lil Nas X I would have done like four hundred more youtube searches and really gone down into the weeds and watched every interview and etc etc. RPF is so big. So I put off source acquisition until finishing the treats!

I went to do my first pass at this right after finishing "dates for iftar," and I downloaded a ton of youtube video, backread twitter, backread insta, and so on. I did that thing where you find a video, it shows a tiny bit of footage from something else, and you go digging for that footage. Unfortunately I also backread tiktok and it gave me a headache, so much flashy looping video why does tiktok have to be like that, but I was still feeling the urge to vid gogogo soooo I took a little Lil Nas X break to go vid something non-flashy.

Vampires vs the Bronx

I hadn't seen this movie before, like, Thursday night three days before assignments were due? And I started vidding it Friday morning. Here's how: I was considering watching one of feedingonwind's film requests to make a treat, maybe this or Space Sweepers, or maybe I'd do Prospect for someone else? And then I realized that I already had a Vampires vs the Bronx song! Or at least, I thought I did, based on the plot description.

The song is by Fantastic Negrito from his album "The Last Days of Oakland," which I had listened to back in 2016 or something and talked about with my dad. I added the song to my good-vid-songs-no-vid-idea playlist then, and then took it off a year or two later when I was like "wtf could I even vid this to except the actual gentrification of Oakland." Then feedingonwind requested Vampires vs the Bronx!

So we watched the movie, which is DELIGHTFUL, and I concluded that I did actually have a Vampires the Bronx song. Also I would highly rec the movie.

That meant I had to go back and figure out which track from the album I was remembering, and then I had to cut it (four minutes long! intro wouldn't work! interview audio for the bridge!).

This was another one that was pretty fast once I had subclipped for it - the musical moments were all very clear, like, the running music signaled "here's where you should have a running or chase montage" and also a lot of it was very clearly signaled in the lyrics. The only thing that threw me was that I had a musical section that I wanted to use for the prep work (garlic etc), but it meant that the final fight section had to be pretty short. Which was fine, but I was glad that bironic made a Vampires vs the Bronx vid that included more of it!

I'm so glad that people talked this film up in the pre-festivids reccing post, which is what put it on my radar in the first place. It was a great time.

Lil Nas X (Part 2)

Okay, back to Lil Nas X! I started clipping (and also just watching the music videos and importing them straight to the project) on the assignment due date. This was a really funny clipping process, because by clipping I meant "taking the three good bits out of that hour long interview," "watching a music video and then importing the whole thing," and also "reviewing my screencaps from twitter." It also made for funny clip review.

I thought I might be able to vid both my songs, but also that I shouldn't count on it because it might get complex - so I intended to start with "Go High Go Low," the more serious text-heavy vid, and then if I had time I'd do the glittery dancey one with all the clips I had left over.

It didn't work out that way, though, because "Go High Go Low" kept annoying me. I had great ideas for some of the lines - almost the first thing I vidded was "I might just wind up a dad" - but structurally I wanted the vid to be semi-sequential and narrative. I also wanted to include some tweets and other text, but reading text and hearing words together is difficult for most people so I wanted them to all land on the chorus which was three lines repeated. These two things completely contradicted each other: I absolutely could not do pre-fame (using a combo of Sun Goes Down and old insta video), Old Town Road, Panini, and Holiday before MONTERO and ALSO keep the text just landing on the chorus. So I got grumpy about this and every time it annoyed me I'd go vid 20 seconds of "Queen" instead, because Queen was so hecking easy. Like. Staccato intro? Photos! If photos, then fashion stuff! "Paradise" obviously MONTERO! Beat beat beat of the drum! So I'd go lay down a bunch of footage smooth as can be and then go back to "Go High Go Low" and wrestle with masking some instagram footage.

It didn't help that I was vidding these in two different frame sizes - the insta and tiktok footage is all pretty low quality, so I didn't want to push it to 1080p, but so much of the glittery video was 1080p or even 2160p and gorgeous. (Except for the intro video, which was from CBS, but was so good I had to use it.) So I decided early on that "Queen" would only use things that could be cropped to 16:9, no black screen or cell phone vertical footage, which limited my clips and therefore made it even easier to vid than "Go High Go Low!" Like, way to remove entire folders of my source video. (This is why the Out photoshoot, which is lovely, only appears in "Go Hi Go Low" - it was crap quality and couldn't be pushed to 1080p, unlike everything from Time or Vogue or whoever. Heck, the Satan sneaker video was 2160p! Wild.) Vidding in two frame sizes simultaneously was a trip but it also meant I could handle some of the really poor-quality old video footage for "Go High Go Low" - which I really wanted! I needed that stuff from tiktok.

Anyway with all those "argh why won't this go here I'm going to go put some dancing in the other vid instead" moments, I finished "Queen" first! And then I had to go back and animate all the tweets for "Go High Go Low," which I got a few comments on but let me tell you I did it in the absolute lowest-rent way possible. This is super simple: screencap tweet, put tweet on video. Put a mask over it if you want round corners or wev. Drop shadow it if you feel fancy. Replicate the text of the tweet in a twitter font (they use some custom one now but I used helvetica neue, which was an old twitter font so it looks right). Put a white box over the screencapped text of the tweet and under your text. Slap a typewriter effect on your text. Now you have animated tweet footage!

These were a delight to vid - I cracked myself up with tweets and with placing footage on appropriate lyrics and with like "fuck my haters" and "black queer joy." Dancing and kissing and success and triumph. I love them both.

Fave sequences:

• "if they ain't mad they bout to be / tell haters from my balcony" which is entirely video of the Satan shoes and also Lil Nas X literally dancing on his balcony. IDK it cracked me up.


• That first "beat beat beat of my drum" which is from an apple music interview, a behind-the-scenes making-of MONTERO video, and a logitech webcam commercial. I had to duplicate frames at the top and bottom of the hand or head gestures to make it hit the beat and it looks perf.


• The "we go high / we go low" that's floating up to heaven and sliding down a pole to hell, perfect, that section is what I thought of the instant I thought of the song.


• The whole "securing your bag / kissing your girl / wind up a dad / born to be bad / born to be great" section, which is like the Lil Nas X ethos all the way through: money and success, hilarious Maury Show episode, giving birth to an album, lap dance for Satan, king of hell. Love it.


• The bit where I screencapped an actual headline from billboard and keyframed it over Lil Nas X falling out of a portal to the future.


• "Does Lil Nas X have to be a gay role model now?"


• The ending of "Go High Go Low."

I am also pleased by the Queen titles, which are similarly super low rent - I was going to try some bokeh effect glitter refraction animated text, but my computer couldn't handle it. So this is literally a text mask over some stock footage of glitter, with a different stock footage glitter effect on top! Then I color adjusted it for the next bit of the title. The crown is ... from a crown font, so it's legit just also a text matte but at an angle. Vidding is just putting things on top of each other.

I finished "Go High Go Low" at midnight the night before go live! So it was close but I did end up making both of them. Wild.

Comments

I saved your "vidding" tag

[jesse_the_k]

...for when I needed a lift and wow howdy do you deliver!

I love your process notes, which help me appreciate the dancing thoughts in your head.

[duskpeterson]

It was fascinating to read this and to see how much hard work went into making the vids. Good vids are like good ice skating routines; they make it look deceptively easy.