Vidding Chatter

[colls]

Hello vidders!!
Welcome to the monthly(-ish) chatter post.


How're your vids going? --- the ones you can talk about at least, for anyone else participating in exchanges.


What was your vidding gateway?
Either the first vid you made or the first vid you saw that made you think "I want to do that".


P.S. Feel free to talk about other vidding things (or non-vidding things), make suggestions for future monthly discussion posts, etc.

Comments

[seekingferret]

4) I'd love to hear people's thoughts on how they use bridges/instrumental sections in songs.

My theory on bridges/instrumentals is that:

a) ideally you luck out and the bridge just falls in the right place to let you continue your narrative arc

but when that doesn't work out:

b) My more pedestrian theory of vidding bridges is that your bridge should be an opportunity to say the same thing you're saying in the rest of the song, but in a different way. So if you've focused primarily on one set of characters, maybe the bridge is an opportunity to explore how a different character interacts with the same themes, or an opportunity to show the same set of characters in one particular setting that reinforces the vid's overall themes.

Also:

c)If you have nothing, it's totally okay to just cut out the bridge altogether! It's not cheating and nobody will look down on you for it.

[nyctanthes]

So sorry it's taken me so long to respond to your thoughtful comment.

To date I've done A (continue the narrative arc), which was a natural choice because the songs were lyrically dense.

But I'm interested in trying out B (explore theme, character, etc. in a new way.) The song I'm currently thinking about (I can't say working with since I've been so focused on writing over vidding this year, and have only started to clip), has minimal lyrics and a lot of instrumentals. Which works with the source in question, but presents challenges since I can't simply match images to words.

[seekingferret]

I find instrumentals fun to work with because you're not pinned down as much by the lyrics, so you get chances to do more dynamic and interesting things with the visuals with less constraint. I've done a few vids to purely instrumental songs and I find it really satisfying. But yes, it can be tricky to figure out at first. The only answer is practice. :P

I did a panel on vidding to jazz, mostly instrumentals, at VVC last year and I think my basic advice that came out of that for dealing with instrumental passages is to first understand the music theory as much as possible. What time signature is it in, what rhythms does it use, what is the overall musical structure, what harmonic structures are used, etc... Just as much as music with lyrics has narrative that you can use, instrumental music has narrative and music theory is the language that has been developed to talk about that narrative structure. I like to put markers on my timeline at key moments: with lyrics, I mark key lyrics that I want to make sure I hit properly... with music, I mark changes in the music, changes in rhythm or instrumentation or key signature.