absolutedestiny

So last year I made this vid and it just so happened that during the making of it my vidding setup was a bit screwy to the point where the sync editing I'd be doing would only be correct on the timeline and would be different when exported. I'd also committed to a 2nd auction vid at the time so didn't really have time to fix it before Vividcon.

If this were a vid of simpler cuts, this probably wouldn't matter so much, but there's a lot of sharp cutting and every time I've watched the vid since I'd be distracted by how subtle but annoying the problem was to me... and possibly only to me.

I don't know if anyone else felt the timing was off in this vid (annoyingly it was actually ok in certain sections and the places it was off it was only out by a frame or so) but I did enough to go back and re-cut it.

It's the same vid, just re-timed. Most of you won't even notice a difference. This is purely for my own sanity.

You can download the new versions at the original vid post.

I think Milly and I both thought we'd be the only one vidding Mirror's Edge. It was hilarious when I found out she'd made one as well but I was so relieved that they were basically two aspects of the source and two different takes. Hers is lovely, you should check it out.

I'm sure many of you don't know what Mirror's Edge is or don't know much about it. It's a first-person video game where you run through a near-future city helping those oppressed by the surveillance state they now live in. In particular, she's trying to uncover a conspiracy that has her sister framed for the murder of a progressive liberty-loving politician. As a game it has a number of praise-worthy components - a determined and independent asian female protagonist, a major de-emphasis on shooting people (possible but optional) and some unique movement mechanics.

I like Mirror's Edge. It's not an easy game - there's a certain point where you becoming skilful enough to be as awesome as Faith and that's a point not everyone reaches before the game gets hard. I like that the heart of the game is these two sisters, it makes up for the not-really-that-interesting conspiracy plot. The cutscenes are kinda poor too - the game itself has such an excellently realise art style that the flash animations in the cutscenes just don't live up to it. In any case, what I wanted to do with this vid was highlight the parts I liked most about the game - the aesthetic, the parkour and the sibling story.

To obtain the footage, I'd have normally just captured my own playthroughs of the game. If you know what you're doing you can beat the game in about the amount of time it would take to watch a movie - plus you can be more 'cinematic' with how you are looking around, doing things that look good rather than being efficient in the game. Unfortunately I did this video over the Christmas period when visiting my folks - meaning I only had my laptop which can run the game but not while also capturing footage. This sucked.

Hence, I had to source my footage elsewhere:

1. EA's official trailers which in some respects look better than some of the in-game footage. With the exception of the compression which is kinda awful and YouTube is the only source that doesn't have big fat logos on it.
   
   
2. In-game cut scenes.
   
   
3. David 'Weatherproof' Streeter's superb speedrun (0:57:32) - excellent flow, obviously, and decent quality footage. The downsides to this source were no PhysX, having to remove the game reticule and, being a speedrun, there's a lot of skipping of key parts of the action and relying on strange game engine exploits.
   
   
4. CowLaunchedGames' pacifist playthrough. I wanted to emphasise the non-lethal aspects of the game so wanted some good disarming footage. This is another source that needed its reticule removed. The free running isn't that great in this playthrough - he's not especially good at the game - but it made for some good scenes.
   
   
5. pmf026's PhysX-enabled playthrough. If this weren't YouTube encoded, this would almost be perfect footage - no subtitles, no reticule and the guy has pretty good flow. Poor compression on YouTube sources means that I preferred using the speedrun wherever possible but this is a nice playthrough and with all the nice special effects that you can only get on the Nvidia graphics cards.

Suffice to say, without these sources there would have been no vid.

This vid posed a number of challenges that I'd not really had in other vids:

1. It is entirely possible to edit the first-person footage in such a way that people watching become motion sick. Scrubbing for clips would make me ill after a while and I'd have to take breaks.
   
   
2. Most of the footage has no people in it and establishing context was difficult in general. Even the scene where Faith meets her sister who has discovered Pope's murder I used slightly sparingly because without knowing the game it's hard to know at that point in the vid who the victim is.
   
   
3. It's one thing to have to remove the logo of a TV channel but you can't just crop things when there's a dot *right in the middle of the footage*. I had to do some fancy logo-removing voodoo but I was really pleased with the results. If you look close at some individual frames you can see the way the footage is blurred but when things are moving it's really hard to spot I think.
   
   
4. AfterEffects' motion tracking tool was inexplicably having a lot of trouble with the building at the end for animating the credits. Normally this kind of perspective work is a cinch for it but it was going crazy trying to track the dark blue on black in three dimensions. Instead I made a null object in 3D space that I keyframed by hand to track the front face of the building and then I used that as a parent for my credits so they'd track the building. It turned out well enough.
   
   
5. People weren't playing the game dramatically enough. I had a hard time finding good footage of the sniper rifle rescue scene - these gamers had no sense of drama and didn't stay around to look at the carnage that ensued after pulling the trigger. Times like those I really wished I did my own captures so there'd be more last-minute escapes and such.

Anyway, it was a fun vid to make although it was more rushed than I wanted - I felt like I wasn't doing enough with the source and song. In any case, Brad likes it (like I knew he would) and that's the most important thing.

Enjoy!

Warnings: Physical triggers, (some strobing, vertigo :P).

Raise Your Weapon by AbsoluteDestiny

one word and it's over

Footage: Mirror's Edge (2008)
Audio: Raise Your Weapon (Madeon Remix) by deadmau5
Duration: 00:03:03

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Another Auction vid? Well, I stepped in to do a pinch hit for Voleuse and I'm so glad I did. Becca and I were discussing the awesomeness of the Bei Fongs and I suggested this song and... yeah. Major thanks have to go to BigBigTruck as this obviously riffs quite heavily on her classic AMV.

For those of you who don't know the shows, the little girl is blind and is the canonical mother of the 50-something woman who is a police officer. Oh, and they are earth and metal benders. Just watch the shows already.

Spoilers for both shows, esp Korra

Mama Said Knock You Out by AbsoluteDestiny

for Voleuse with special thanks to Eunice and Big Big Truck

Footage: Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005) and The Legend of Korra (2012)
Audio: Mama Said Knock You Out by LL Cool J
Duration: 00:03:44

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When working out a vid concept for gwyneth's auction vid, this idea for a Ripley vid emerged. I was really keen but Gwyn preferred for me to vid The Navigator (link soon) so I did. After the auction vid was done I figured I'd make this for the Premieres show. Problem was the Premieres deadline had passed. So, the day after the Premiere's deadline, I asked for an 'extension' and was given two days to make this :)

I'm happy with how its came out even though it was rushed. I've always wanted to do a Ripley vid and as it happens Gwyn liked the result too!

Say Aha by AbsoluteDestiny

Louder than they allow, allow

Footage: Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986)
Audio: Say Aha (Tepr Edit) by Santigold
Duration: 00:04:18

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Just saw the first episode. Really really good. I love her so much.

Can't wait until April for this show to start.

Today I added two new guides to the Vidding Tech Wiki!

The first is Fixing Common Problems with Submitted Files which will hopefully help other folks who make dvds for conventions like we do at vividcon.

The second guide is about how to, with as few steps as I could manage, install Linux on a virtual machine so that you can run LlamaEnc on any operating system where you can install VirtualBox (such as OSX).

Both of them relate somewhat to the beta test of LlamaEnc and Llamamatic which if you are a vidder hoping to use these tools on the last day of vid submissions for Vividcon then you should be testing them right now! Currently I don't even know if they install on other people's machines let alone do what they are designed to do so please go and test them.

So the Festivids list has been posted (all the awesome thanks in the world to jetpack_monkey and laura47 for my vids!!!) so as you can find out, I made 7 vids this year!

Rather than spamming my flist with posts I figured I'd made this one meta-post linking to them. If you were a recipient of any of these vids, I strongly recommend downloading a copy because the streaming web versions are not (especially on vimeo) synced as accurately as I think they should be. Basically the download versions are better.

The vids I made in order of creation are:

1. You Made Me Feel So Young (to Mary Poppins, for stephantom) [My assigment]
2. Doomsday (to Independence Day for fan_eunice) [treat]
3. Livin' On A Prayer (to Rocky and Rocky III for sisabet) [treat]
4. Papa's Got A Brand New Bag (to Maru for giandujakiss)[treat]
5. Ballroom Blitz (to Ghostbusters for sdwolfpup) [treat]
6. Jailbreak (to Star Wars the original trilogy for colls) [Pinch Hit]
7. Livin' In The Sunlight, Lovin' In The Moonlight (to Batman for sweetestdrain) [treat]

No lie, this is a lot of vids. Like, I've not made this many vids in so short a time span in years. Possibly ever. I do have to apologise to my recipients: because I was vidding so fast the vids might not all be as polished as I'd like, though I think on the whole they turned out fairly well.

This year, I decided to take a slightly different approach for Festivids. Last year, I nominated a *ton* of sources thinking, mostly, 'oh yeah I've seen that movie once I could probably vid it at a stretch' and other such fallacies. This year, I asked myself the following questions:

1. Do I love this source?
2. Would it be awesome if there was a vid that I made to this source?
3. Would I be thrilled to get this source as an assignment?

If any of these were anything other than OMGYES, I didn't nominate it. In the end I only nominated 42 sources and, incidentally, only 2 of those sources were ones I ended up vidding (the other 5 vids were sources I would never have been assigned). See, I wanted to be sure that whatever the recipient wanted, I'd feel confident that I could do a good job for them.

The next major decision was that this year I would not spend weeks and weeks and weeks looking for that perfect all-encompassing vidsong. I did that last year and more often than not, that vid song just doesn't exist. Instead, I had to accept that even though I was unlikely to vid this source again the fact that I couldn't find a song that represented every single one of my feelings about the source should not stop me just making a damn vid already. I basically concluded that if the song worked well enough, I could pretty much make a decent enough vid and that that was fine.

So that's what I did. What I found was that I could do this a lot: once I had a vidsong that had a basic hook I could churn out a fairly enjoyable vid fairly fast. They weren't deep vids but they were fun and that's precisely what festivids is about!

tl;dr I let go a little and made a ton of vids that I'm pretty happy with. They're worth a watch, I think.

P.S. I'd like to thank everyone who left comments on my vids while they were anonymous, it meant a lot to me that you enjoyed the vids!

Making all these vids over my Christmas vacation was so much fun that I didn't want to stop. So when I saw the last round of pinch hits go up, I knew I wanted to grab this one.

Colls had suggested 70s or 80s but was worried about it being cheesy but was happy for something fun and actiony. 'I can do that', I thought to myself. Now, I actually have some major major issues with Star Wars or more to the point with George Lucas' repeated screwing over of my childhood. Star Wars was, without a doubt, by first fandom. I LOVED STAR WARS. So much. Figures, stickers, the Empire Strikes Back bedspread and matching PJs. It was happy hi-jinx and adventure time. What I didn't like was 1997 and everything that followed. The Special Edition was a travesty - the new CG was hideous, goofy and made the whole thing look so incredibly dated and needlessly so. The art design and special effects on the original trilogy were pioneering and internally perfectly consistent. The new stuff was garish and laughable. Then you had every revison after that - Greedo shooting (screw who shot first, Greedo never shot ever), replacement Anakins ('who the fuck is that guy' thought Luke) and finally the total desecration of Vader in his origin story. God damn you, Lucas.

So, if I were to vid Star Wars, it would be to the Star Wars of my youth and without Lucas' modern retcon bullshit. So, first rule was that there would be no special edition footage. No new Death Star explosions, no new cloud city, no new blue snow on Hoth, no new pink lightsabers, no new dead Jedi, no new creepy ewok eyes. Thankfully, fan restoration projects are plentiful and Harmy had recently completed his really excellent De-specialisation project where High Def footage was used where available and Laserdisc or GOUT-sourced footage was used for the scenes as they should be. The next major decision was to exclude Vader and any overt use of the force. In focusing on the getaways and the rebels as scrappy underdogs there wasn't really any place for the father-son story. So I figured since Vader had been so thoroughly defanged by Lucas, I'd just remove him altogether in this vid. I think it was for the best. Lots of Han, Leia, Luke and Lando with a fair share of Chewie, R2, 3PO, Obi Wan, Wedge and Ackbar.

Jailbreak by AbsoluteDestiny

The criminal hi-jinx of the rebel scum.

Footage: Star Wars (1977), Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (1983) and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
Audio: Jailbreak by Thin Lizzy
Duration: 00:03:16

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Continuing the "wouldn't it be a shame if" theme, I was delighted to see that the internet's favourite kitty had been requested for Festivids but, I thought to myself, what if nobody makes a Maru vid! Of course, my fears were unfounded as unknown to me a very very excellent, vid with humour love and tenderness was being made in the form of Outside the Box.

Anyway, I decided that I would try and put together a super-quick, super-fun Maru vid. Yeah, this was the year where I decided that literalism was *exactly* what festivids needed.

Papa's Got A Brand New Bag by AbsoluteDestiny

Footage: Maru (まる) (2011)
Audio: Papa's Got A Brand New Bag (pt 1) by James Brown
Duration: 00:01:30

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