Vid! Buffy meets the First Slayer...

[quinara]

My write-up of writerconuk is coming at some point, as are the RL forms I need to fill in and, heh, my plot_wout_porn fic... For the last couple of days, though, I've been rather blindsided by this vid I've been working on for a while, which has been distracting me from pretty much everything else. It's about Buffy! And the First Slayer! Upset and reconciliation!

(Though, psst, word of advice: never do a vid to a song called 'Stress', because it will turn out to be an omen. Vimeo and I will be having words about aspect ratios and the need to make things HD just to work. Sorry the file/buffer-time is so huge! As for WMM... Don't even.)

Warnings for spinning images, flashing images, fairly screechy music and the odd bit of gore. It settles down eventually though!

Stress.

You're not the source of me, you said.

[Buffy the Vampire Slayer + Justice 'Stress']
[Hi-Def Stream and download link.]

Comments

Stress

[yourlibrarian]

I liked the impressionistic style here, seemed very in keeping with the Slayer dreams.

Re: Stress

[quinara]

Oh, I'm glad - thanks for telling me! :)

[stultiloquentia]

...How did you get so good at vidding so fast? Seriously, you seem to have barreled right past the usual youtubey Lord King Bad Vid stage and gone straight for the technically deft and thematically complicated. I'm kind of amazed.

I LOVE the effects. That's hands down the most effective use of that whiteout tool I've ever seen. It matches the setting! It's like a desert blindness: the sand (which is, as you know, Bob, her inner landscape) takes over her whole field of vision. It is a vision; it becomes the canvas on which her story (the shadowplay) is drawn. She is the canvas (the First Slayer is covered with paint), she is the story. That's just cool.

It's been a while since I've watched those sequences, but the casting of the FS never made me so uncomfortable. The big, muscular African behaving like an animal. But, as has been discussed before, there are valid reasons for casting a black woman. I'm trying to think how I'd have done that scene, how I'd have gotten around the ick, if I'd been directing. I think I have it. I'd have split the FS in two bodies: a sympathetic black girl, in the shadowplay sequence, and a Slayer demon in full body paint, blue or white or something. Anyhow, this doesn't have much to do with our vid; I'm just pondering how the images struck me in the moment.

Back to the vid: Someone on LJ was commenting on the control it takes to vid without lyrics, and I totally agree. The way you're able to build momentum and then, when the music changes, fling yourself out into a slow-motion soar, is really stunning. I nagged you about pacing during the Hamlet vid, didn't I? Well, you seem to have mastered THAT element. Jeez. Also, what a great song!

For some reason, I really like the little red car scooting into the desert. The cutting and acceleration in there reminds me of, oh, crap, whatshisname -- Ron Fricke, the director of Chronos and Koyaanisqatsi. He uses time lapse photography a lot, juxtaposing shadows inching across deserts and mountains and things with, oh, traffic patterns on escalators in giant shopping malls compressed into ten seconds. Vast, harsh ancient Nature vs. tiny, busy, humanity. It worked. Giles and Buffy move fast, like ants; they can't wait. But the desert they visit has all the time in the universe.

The one complaint I have about your style is that I'm, um, too dumb for it. I'm actually a bit vain about my ability to synthesize information, and "read" most vids swiftly and deeply (if I know the source, and if the vidder's really good, sometimes even when I don't), but yours leave me struggling, wondering if I'm missing key steps in your argument. And if I miss steps in FF, or a Hamlet staging I've never seen, that's one thing, but Buffy I know forwards and backwards. So I feel like in the last seconds of this vid, your language isn't loud enough...like you're missing a part of speech -- a clip (or clips) that would act as verb or noun and pull your sentence together for me. I think some of your clips are working too hard: they stand for whole paragraphs of information in your head, but I can't follow. I'm feeling dumb, and a well-constructed vid should make me feel smart -- not spoon-fed, but accomplished for being able to read the narrative.

So, that very last bit -- Buffy breaking the chain/connection and the FS going *headtilt* left me...underwhelmed. That headtilt. I think I wanted it to be more melodramatic and anvilicious. But I'm not sure.

Thoughts?

[quinara]

*claps hands* Oooh, thank you for this feedback! You make it such a pleasure to post stuff, you know that, right?

In combo-answer to your first and last points it's probably best I meta on how I've ended up approaching vidding. For me, it's like theatre (or dance, probably more precisely, but this runs into the problem that ballet has never been what I've wanted it to be), so what I want at the end of it is a) a story, b)a spectacle and c) meta narrative(s) that makes me think, but with the added caveat that (in accordance with my personal taste), while a) should be strongly argued, c) should only ever be suggestive rather than prescriptive. (Actually, this is kind of what I want from every sort of story, but theatre feels like a better fit for vidding because there are a lot more abstract tools at your disposal...) Of course, finding the balance between 'suggestive' and 'random and confusing' is my principal problem! :D

On top of that, I think, is the issue that I don't know a good way of signalling that the background of a scene is more important than the foreground. (This was an issue in my FF vid as well - but luckily there was footage of Rinoa walking in exactly the same way across two different dancefloors, so I could at least flick between them.) In my very last clip of this vid what's important (to me) is the FS being in Buffy's living room, not so much that she's tilting her head. I should have worked out a better way to signal that. Silly source only ever has the FS attack Buffy in her house.

To me, when it comes down to it, this vid is about a number of things. On a very basic level, it's about Buffy facing up to the FS (/the Slayer inside herself), so paralleling Primeval/Restless and Get It Done to see how things change. At the same time, I very much wanted it to be about the First Slayer's perspective in Restless (hence why she's the suggested POV of the summary text), and how Buffy/the Scoobies did treat her as a resource to be chained up at will and set to work. With slightly less certainty, though, I also found myself exploring the Get It Done 'spell', and the way that actually paralleled Primeval by (again) treating the Slayer (through her story) as something only worth thinking about/looking at/turning towards in times of crisis. So, optimistically thinking, I wanted my story to have the inflection of Buffy coming to deal with the FS permanently on her/the Slayer's own terms, rather than interacting with her selectively through the Watchers' crafted medium of spells and stories. (In my head) that's why, in the closing sequences, the FS stops expressing herself through actions (Buffy against Adam) and other people's speech (Tara), replaying the meeting as if just between her and Buffy - followed by Sumerian turning to English (or it would have been if the props department had written cuneiform rather than changing their keyboard language to Greek and typing out a dodgy transliteration *facepalm*) and Buffy's breaking of the Watchers' symbolic staff bringing the FS out of the desert and into the living room.

I refused to use shots of the FS talking like her mouth and vocal chords were only ever made to emit grunts, because, well, just no. I didn't think her gestures were too dehumanising in expressing 'WTF is this person from the future with funny skin and funny clothes?', but otherwise there was a definite attempt at pointing out that the FS behaves no differently than Buffy when she's pissed off...

Anyway - I'd love for any reflections you have on what you think was missing! I didn't really want the ending to be too anvilicious, but I wouldn't have minded it to feel like it had ended. ;)

(And the song is wonderful - even more so in full!)

[laeria]

Woe, has this been removed?

[quinara]

It shouldn't be! I'll try embedding it again, but otherwise the direct link should hopefully work with the password 'buffster' (I tried it logged out and it seemed to; don't know what's going on here).