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Does anyone have links or advice on making dance vids specifically (Or if not dance vids, action-heavy vids that are mostly about showing the characters moving to the music?) I'm looking at the vexercises "Rhythm" days but I'd love to look over something written out, it it exists.

I will probably never finish it but I have been struck with inspiration for a vid I could maybe actually do, but I've never really thought about making dance vids before.

(Older stuff for tutorials is fine, my vid asthetic is stuck c. 2005 anyway.)

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my vid asthetic is stuck c. 2005 anyway

Hee!

Look I know my tastes, and they are not fancy :P

(Older stuff for tutorials is fine, my vid asthetic is stuck c. 2005 anyway.)

Ha! Me too.

*rifles through my LJ memories* Lots of entries have since been deleted, but #10 here might be useful to think about?

Oooh, thanks, I remember that one! A lot of good advice for vidding generally, too.

I've never written anything out but I love making dance vids! I'm sure there's lots of strategies but I largely focus on motion matching to mimic the idea of dancing. As in, matching the motion of the people to the clip that came before and after it, to make a full story of someone twirling or moving across the screen from the clips together. I do it a lot in this vid, for instance. I'm not sure how to help with rhythm stuff, I mostly just count it out lol. But a dance vid sounds awesome, good luck.

Thank you!

I think the story I'm trying to tell with this one would be more about parallels motion over cuts than about one cut moving into another? So cutting between three different jumps in three different contexts, but all to the same beat? I rewatched Game On yesterday and that may be more like what I am planning to do than a classic dance vid. Or maybe I'm just intimidated by all the amazing motion matching in y'all dance vids. (But also it's mcyt fandom, so the footage is... weird compared to classic media fandoms. In some ways I think it'll be easier to work with though.)

I am super tempted to just look up the beat of the song I'm using and cut my clips mathematically by multiples of beats, but that may be a terrible idea.

I am a big mathematical cutter actually, so I totally support that plan! It can work well.

Game On is an awesome model, I love working by finding similar shots in motion based stuff as well. There's still a decent amount of motion-based logic guiding shot choice in it I think, like with the ball being hit/kicked back and forth, but it's a cool way of doing it. Also, don't be intimidated! I might just be weird but imo match finding can be really fun.

Oh cool! Do you have specific software you use for cutting? It seems cutting a lot of clips separately has kind of gone of of style but I think I need to do it that way.

I really don't know a lot of writing about this, and I wish I did because it would have meant I wouldn't have had to figure out so many things myself.

The closest in my own writing is my process notes on WMLTMD: https://seekingferret.dreamwidth.org/231020.html where I talk about how I slowly got better at motion matching OVER SIX MONTHS OF PERSISTENT WORK by continuing to poke away at the vid as I accumulated more and more source and developed more and more of an eye for what looks right and keeps the viewer's eye in the right place. Subsequent projects have been easier and better, it really is just muscles you develop with practice.

The best writing on motion matching I've seen from another vidder is, unsurprisingly, by

lim, in her zine videlicet. https://vidders.github.io/articles/vidding/demystifying.html "Demystifying Vidding" is both fantastic on its own terms, and also useful as an introduction because it provides vocabulary from film theory that you can use to read further. Unfortunately, videlicet has the worst UI I've ever seen. It's especially unfortunate because in addition to "Demystifying Vidding", the zine has a ton of other incredibly useful content and I hate that I always have to warn people that they will have to endure the UI to get to that content.

Otherwise, the answer is to look at general film theory of continuity editing and try to figure out how it applies to nonlinear projects.

Two other small pieces of advice:

At the final Vividcon they had a panel on the best vidding advice anyone had ever received, and more than one person emphasized a specific, tiny tip: If you want a clip to land on the beat, they said, start it three frames earlier.

And if you want to learn how vidders do motion matching, import vids you admire into your editor and step through them a frame at a time to see what's happening. It's hard to understand these things at speed, all of film is about tricking the eye/

Oh, yeah, I was already looking over your process notes for WMLTMD, they were the first thing I thought of. This is not going to be a work of genius with deep personal meaning though so I am probably not going to put in six months of getting incrementally better. I didn't know about that zine though, that looks like a great resource!

(Also thanks for the various places you've recommended kdenlive; I'm finding it way more intuitive than Da Vinci Resolve, at least at the very basic level I work in.)

Yeah, I'm definitely using Resolve more and more often these days for all its features, but if I just want to bang out a vid quickly, Kdenlive is still my go to.

Would seeing some dance vid examples help?

I have a list of dance vids (and similarly motion-based) vids I like that I've been looking at! Unfortunately I am way better at taking things in verbally than visually (which is part of why I am probably doomed to never be a great vidder) so having a written list of things to pay attention to would help. But I am getting a fair amount just by looking at them and comparing them to what I want to do.

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