Imaginary vidding?

[cimorene]

I was thinking this song would make a pretty awesome film trailer, or alternatively, a cool vid, if it were a trailer-type vid. But I came up against a wall in thinking about it: I'm not a sufficiently visual/viddy thinker to make an imaginary vid in my head, though I can visualise imaginary stories (or works of un-animated visual art for that matter) till the cows come home. I have a certain level of sense when I listen to the song - perhaps a few moments from canon will leap to mind and I'll think "something about that death bit in this verse" or "that shot from the credits there" or "sadface!", and on a separate level, things like "action shots" and "something slow moving" and "some quick cuts would go here". But I can't put those things together, nor call to mind enough clips, to in any way visualise what the vid would look like.

I also don't see stories that I write as movies. I tend to actually visualise the typewritten words of the sentence as I go along narrating (along with bits and pieces of images and dialogue and so on), although in recent years I have moved more towards visualising scenes for purposes of stage directions and that sort of thing, but it's a conscious effort.

[Poll #952627]

Er. Discuss?

I wonder: are all successful vidders (by which I mean people who set out to make vids and then finish them, as opposed to giving up) people who "see" the vid when they hear the song, or is there a spectrum there? Is there intuitive vidding vs methodical vidding that doesn't proceed from a whole preconception?

Comments

[happiestwhen.livejournal.com]

I've only made one fanvid and in that case, the visual came before the music, because I was so stuck for what song to use. But I did sort of have an idea of how to order the scenes. I feel like that was more of the methodical vidding though, and is a bad example of the whole mental-visual => finished product thing, because it was not so much artistic as just me wanting a summary of the pairing for myself (and I was only working with two episodes, so it was much more... compact in scope?).

When I'm writing, however, I nearly always see things in a cinematic way rather than in a sentence-by-sentence way, which is probably why when I go to write things down I end up with really vague outlines, or bullet points of key details, but have trouble putting it all into words. Sometimes I'll get ideas of a line or stylistic pattern that will stick with me and help to shape the narrative, but that's more the exception than the rule for me. Usually I just think in images, which is kind of unhelpful when what I need are plots. :-P I have playlists for pairings and for characters and when I listen to the songs on them, I get scenes running through my head along with them. The problem for me is that it's hard to then turnaround and express that scene to someone else, since it inevitably fails to match up with whatever I had in mind to begin with.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

That is funny - I hadn't even considered the possibility that people would make vids (well, visualise them?) without the music! I guess that would count as methodical still, although what I was thinking of was hunting through episodes and so on in search of clips for different parts, and that is sort of the other way around.

And I do see that if the vid is about the pairing (or you could say perhaps - about the entire show or movie, the way a trailer would be?) then that is in a sense inverted from the more usual process where the song is used as a source of theme and so on.

When you say that you see a story cinematically, don't you mean that you also see each individual scene cinematically? So wouldn't you have a visual of the events - at least what the environment looked like and all the stage directions and so on, physical language perhaps, if not dialogue? I can see that that could be hard to put into words, but doesn't seeing the scene unfold cinematically at least mean you know what happens?

[revulo.livejournal.com]

I tend to do this a LOT when I'm listening to music. In fact, it's more fufilling to be able to think of a vid for a piece of music than not. It actually has meaning to me, then.
I don't make fanvids at all, and I haven't written in goodness knows how long. So this is a pretty feasible alternative for me. :p

[cimness.livejournal.com]

Do you mean that music doesn't have meaning for you when you don't visualise it as a vid? So can it not be meaningful in itself, in a way that would be applicable to, say, more than one source material? Because if you see a song as related to a vid of one movie or show then wouldn't the music always make you think of that show?

[kegom.livejournal.com]

I can't quite answer your question, not being a vidder myself; but I do know from a friend of mine who loves making vids that she sees the completed vid before her eyes before she has even started. However, she knows the one series she makes vids for by heart, even knowing what kind of dialogue/movements happened, for example, in minute 30 of episode 3; so she basically just picks the scenes from her memory and decides whether they'll fit in the context, or not. So, I wonder whether she doesn't belong to the kind of people who have learned to see the vids visually by having watched the canon over and over and over again, without actually being "visual" themselves.

(Am I making sense here? I'm not sure whether I was able to convey what I wanted to say...)

Also, I'm with sioniann all the way on the "being a visual type" thing. I've experienced exactly the same things as she has, and it can be interesting; but very often it is hell for writing a fic, because how can I convey the way a person stands in a kitchen, or how someone smiles, for example, without using up to a hundred words and losing my readers completely? I think you're better off seeing the words in your mind.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

Obviously, I don't write without any visual impressions of things - it would be difficult or, indeed, impossible to provide sensory descriptions. There's really no problem visualising a story at all with media-based fandoms, where there's a pool of source material and I know exactly what the characters' postures and tics and habits look and sound like, not to mention many of the settings.

I believe the difference is in the genesis of the creative idea, perhaps - a movie in one's head morphing, with various degrees of ease or difficulty, to a verbal description, or a story or pieces of a story giving rise to "what does that look like?", and the tapestry of sensory imagining pieced together more or less consciously like a collage of other impressions. Wax assures me that her stories are slickly produced and directed with effects and camera angles and filters and everything, and it's how to convey the effect of the camera angle that she struggles with, while I think from within the stream of consciousness of my point of view character.

The difference is perhaps that I don't struggle to find words for how the sunlight strikes a landscape or the emotion infusing a character's gesture because I think in a verbal, descriptive framework automatically. My impression of these things could hardly exist in my mind without words attached to it.

[schonste.livejournal.com]

If by "I do it all the time" you mean "think about it" and not actually making them. I listen to music in video -- as in, when I hear music, everything that goes through my head is images of what would look perfect with that particular piece of music. Which is why official music videos can make me so annoyed, because it's not how I invision the stuff.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

Yes, in the poll I just meant imaginary ones, thus the "in your head" part.