SSJVegita0609 wrote:Citing specific examples, define yourselves as an editor to me (should you consider yourself definable). If you've got a style, any style (even more than one), show me which video first conveyed it, and which video BEST conveys it. How long did it take you to reach each point?
Now you guys go. Can't wait to see what you say.
*********WARNING: FOLLOWING POST IS TL;DR**********
So I took a look at my back catalog, because I was fairly certain that I didn't have so much of a style as a developmental continuum, and that what style I had for my first 3.5 years/93 videos was constrained by the technology I had available. What was not defined was how much that period influenced me as an editor as opposed to the four years I spent developing as a metalhead and musician before ever seeing an AMV.
Stuff I know I do:
- Structure around the riff structure, not the beats
- Generally use undersubscribed sources
- Do the absolute minimum amount of work required, in the absolute minimum amount of time required, to keep the video from sucking, analyzing such by statistical process control
Back when I originally looked at this, I had my work blocked by 'era'; the first covered 15 (13 for these purposes) videos done in the space of about 3 months under severe technological limitations (no DVD drive, and I had my capture card set up for MPEG1, not MPEG2), which are entered more or less serially in the database as
SH001 through
SH013 (ignoring demo videos, and SH008 isn't in this series as it's still under another profile). I decided to track for these on anime, music, and genre, as cutting style was both constrained by the need to avoid subs and subject to SPC to reduce cut length on the hypothesis that sorter average length will necessarily bring more stuff into audio-visual synch due to closure.
Call this first block "Forever Underground" after the Vital Remains song of the same name. I sorted anime into popular and undersubscribed based on whether I could recall other people generally making videos with it at that time, and unsurprisingly came out with a lot of populars; I was restriced to VHS when VHS was trailing off, at a time when the import selection was smaller than it is now, and never personally enough of an otaku to special-order anything. The music, though, was totally opposite; the filter here for popular was anything you might have found in commercial radio at the time, and 10 of 13 still came out as underground, with one even breaking down as 'local', which I only had access to because I knew members of the band. This would be consistent but less pronounced moving forward. Surprisingly, despite the overloading of underground metal in the music column, only 7.5 of the genre entries split out as either action or horror (.5 is something that was action/comedy). I was trying to do new things with metal in AMV, so this is a small indicator in that direction.
Interesting but probably meaningless: I did not do a drama video until after my initial exposure to the .org. I had drama videos on my production slate before that, but had not actually executed any of them. Best representatives from this period are probably
SH007 and
SH005; this last was redone/remastered as
SH097, so it's possible to see the difference that four years, 90 videos, and better equipment makes.
The next period runs from
SH017 to about
SH043, which was already in progress when I (re)joined the .org and started to participate in/become corrupted by its collective consciousness. Categories tracked were the same as above, plus another column for source material origin: VHS, DVD, or someone else's encode. Of interest is that under anime, undersubscribed sources account for over half of all videos; part of this is the expanding market and part is better internet access at school. There's a similar effect in genre with drama accounting for 9/19 videos --and since this is a composite score, 11/19 have at least some drama component. What caused this shift precisely is unknown.
Also interesting is the sharp inflection point corresponding to the point in February 2002 when Adobe Premiere killed my capture card. Before that, the source column is nearly all VHS with a small salting of rips and DVD-caps, and after that it's all other people's encodes. Five of the seven videos after that point were made with undersubscribed sources; I do have a taste for the obscure, but in this case project selection was being significantly constrained by technology. Index cases from this "second age" are
SH020 and
SH028.
These themes continued over the next 5 months,
SH044 to
SH063. There are a bunch of anime marked as undersubscribed that would later become popular, but I was using them ahead of the curve here; only 5 get rated as popular, but Ai Yori Aoshi, Hoshi no Koe, RahXephon, and others would get up to that status sometime after the early fall of 2002. Of note is that drama drops back significantly at the expense of character profiles; drama is only in 7/20 by itself, but if profiles are also counted, the number goes up to 12/20. The mixed feelings I have about my work since that initial period are now explained; I don't really
like doing every second video as some kind of drama, but it always seems to still
happen. This was also when I started to experiment more with effects, but it's still pretty damn basic stuff, just harder to produce than it looks because of the technology.
There maybe should be another inflection point at
SH052 where I started cutting source differently, but this was a SPC-driven change that didn't really have any stylistic impact. Standout videos from this time would probably be
SH054,
SH056, and
SH058.
It can be argued that the only thing that changed between late December 2002 and before is that I fixed my capture card; there's a slightly greater incidence of popular anime, but stylistically there are drama and/or character-profile elements in 15 of the 27 videos from
SH064 to
SH092 (demo videos not included). At this point, it's arguable that I was 'mature' stylistically, at least within the bounds of my equipment, despite the fact that most of the videos I was making were for some bizarre reason the kind that I really don't like generally. I can't solve this conundrum, especially as the videos that I feel best represent me as an editor all seem to come out of this time period:
SH064: mardraum
SH070: ~
SH088: -- (rubicons)
SH092: 0x0075 0x2ec4 [[ch]ILL] 0x59b8
In January 2005 I finally got the PC I had built in July 2004 up and outfitted as an editing station. This involved changing software to an actual NLE with actual effects capabilty built-in, and the resulting videos showed it. Stuff from
SH093 to present (
SH109, not released yet) has been done on three different computers, but it's all the same Magix, so there's a fair degree of consistency across them. More flexibility, more finely grained detail (now frame-level instead of half-second granularity), more effects, and more tracks all mean more work now to create the same length of video, so I seem to have focused more on projects I like working on; dramatic/profile deathmarches are down to 6 in 16 videos. I'm still doing the same fundamental things, cutting on riffs and exploiting internal synch so I can stop worrying about this cut and move on, but I'm just doing them with more attention to frame-level detail and generally tweaking more things to make stuff come out as intended. The base plan is the same, but more visible now with the technological limitations pushed back.
Representative samples from here are probably
SH094,
SH101 or
SH102, and
SH106. Future directions are not evident, and I don't really have anything concrete planned beyond the next two projects; it's possible that I could hang it up for good early in 2007, and also possible that I could keep on milling out oddly constructed and oddly concepted stuff at irregular intervals for the decade to come. Damned if
I really know what I'm doing.
--K
