The Quickening - Videos

[Kinematics]

Personal notes:

In the past I've focused almost exclusively on technical flaws, as that's what I feel I'm best suited to analyze. Towards the second round and up, I was finding myself struggling quite often with videos where technical issues were minor at best, and instead trying to work out how to approach a critique on a thematic or contextual basis.

Since my focus has been more on technical, that also guides the approach I use in writing things up. I set a bar that I consider 'flawless' (or close enough that it starts getting incredibly nitpicky to move beyond it), then find the gaps that divide the actuality from the ideal. That ends up with my reviews being written almost entirely in the negative, even for videos that I really do like a lot, and I hope people didn't find my writing overly critical.

On the other hand, at the higher end where technical issues are a lesser concern, I find myself floundering in trying to shape what I write. There is no 'ideal' marker for me to judge against, and I don't want to say "You're wrong" to someone who merely has a different creative vision than my own. This is the part where I really wish there had been more people writing reviews, to give some sort of balance and context to my own view of the videos.

In addition, I feel like I'm lacking the vocabulary to properly express my views, and that that limits what I'm able to say (there's posts on the forums with various general terms, but not much with specific technical minutia). This leads to not being able to easily pinpoint specific scenes and time frames during a critique, and makes it feel like I'm doing a disservice to the creator in not being able to point to specific bits for them to examine and work on.

I feel like I should also be putting more into what I consider was done right in each video. With the technical review, what's "right" is, "Don't make these mistakes." It's not nearly that clear on the creative side, though. I tried to add a bit of that in Ileia's notes, but it's just a minimal start. Hopefully I can find ways to improve over time.