Festivids 2021, a reflection
Feb. 6th, 2022 10:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hartknyxFestivids was such a big part of my winter this year that I'm going to write a wholeass blog post about it ♥ Please enjoy (or don't, your choice lol), or skip to the vid notes for some behind-the-scenes commentary with less memoir!
My approach to offering Festivids fandoms is "offer everything in the tagset that I love the most and let fate decide the rest". This year fate spun methingswithwings, whom I matched with on Taskmaster UK! I adore their vids so I was excited and a little nervous haha.
Taskmaster was one of the fandoms I requested as well as offered - I was introduced to the show when I lived with two friends for a brief period in late 2020, and quickly fell in love with the ridiculous antics and low-stakes competition. I threw a roaringly successful Taskmaster-themed zoom party for my birthday where my friends and I made each other recreate memes and sculpt dinosaurs and drink weird cocktails and the like - A+ experience, highly recommend it.
Now please understand: if you'd asked me in, say, October 2021, "Hey Kat, how much of Taskmaster have you seen?" I would have said "I dunno, most of it!"
It turned out I'd seen 9 episodes out of 106. (Plus an awful lot of individual tasks and highlights compilations on Youtube, so it's totally understandable that it felt like more LOL).
Did I do the sensible thing and get started right away? Nope! Did I come up with a vid idea that was reasonably limited in scope? Nope! Did I pivot to one of the other delightful (and shorter!!) fandoms thingswithwings compellingly pitched in their letter? Nope, although I played the video game 80 Days they requested and thought about it! Instead I spent November obsessing over potential treats and nonvid projects, (and also struggling with a huge amount of seasonal and existential depression that didn't help), and FINALLY at the beginning of December I realized that a Big Challenging Creative Project was exactly what I wanted and needed and settled in to watch AND clip BASICALLY ALL of Taskmaster. Go Big or Go Home, right? ;)
It was all-encompassing. I beamed so much British comedy directly into my brain that I started ending sentences with "innit?" in my head. (Go ahead, ask me if I have a favorite British linguistic quirk now.) I crocheted an entire dress while watching. I laughed, I cried (with laughter). Unlike last year, where I successfully kept my festivids work under wraps until reveals, I was so deep into Taskmaster and Taskmaster clipping that I could not shut up about it and all of my vidder friends and some of my non-vidder friends knew exactly what I was making and how it was going at all times. I had three different files going with song brainstorms. I couldn't believe I could only dig up four existing Taskmaster fanvids (three on AO3 and one deep on Youtube) so the pressure to choose the right song felt immense, since so few of them had been used already!
I'd never made a vid anywhere NEAR the scope of "all of Taskmaster." I'm pretty new to vidding (I made my first vid ever in September 2020), and all the vids I'd made so far were extremely limited in scope - either from a limited (movie-length) canon or focusing narrowly on one or two characters from a larger canon. But I knew that I would love to make at least one gen Taskmaster tribute, and I knew that the best way to do it was to watch EVERYTHING - if only so I didn't embarrass myself by missing an obvious lyric match! Plus I think Taskmaster is an intimidating but relatively gentle show to clip; it's easy to skim large portions, like stage sections or certain tasks, if they don't seem promising, and still have plenty of great footage even if you miss something good.
Learning to use Da Vinci Resolve's keyword tagging system for clips was life- and vid-saving (thank yousandalwoodbox)! In the end I'd say I clipped about half of Taskmaster as thoroughly as I wanted to, and by then I knew a little more about what I was looking for, (and also I was very much running out of time,) so I was faster and more selective about the later seasons, often hunting down moments from my memory instead of going through episodes and adding clips to the database. This came back to bite me a little when making a treat later - the seasons I underclipped are dramatically underrepresented compared to the seasons I clipped thoroughly. I do hope to go back and finish my clipping database before making any future Taskmaster vids :)
Having an assigned buddy through the new buddy system was awesome! I liked having someone anonymous-safe to chat to and stay on track with, and giving and getting sneak previews of our vids was really fun, and I LOVED conspiring for treats after assignments were due, plus it was a huge bonus that they were friends with my recipient lol. I handed off a list of the most glorious and filthy Taskmaster clips I'd discovered but didn't know how to use tochagrined, who added some of their own and put them to LEGENDARY use in a treat vid we both knew thingswithwings would appreciate. I was thrilled to enable something that leaned into their delights a little more specifically than the Taskmaster vids I felt capable of making lol.
Last year I did a small Festivids watch party with a few friends, which was delightful, and this year I did the big Festivids watch party on the community discord, which was delightful. I loved being shown every vid, especially the ones I wouldn't have bothered to watch myself, and I loved the stream setup even when my ISP was being dumb about it, and I loved feeling like I was growing closer to the community in real time.
Specific vid notes:
ALL STAR
AO3 link for download, etc.
The second I cut out the clip of Mel actually making the shape of an L on her forehead was the second I knew what song I was picking for my assignment. All Star actually came up relatively early in my song brainstorming and I was like "but the lyrics are so specific and it would be underwhelming not to nail them," and then suddenly I had my solution for the most specific lyric in the song and it was a done deal. I sent a screenshot of her to some friends like "guess which song I picked?" and they all guessed All Star correctly. lol
I immediately knew I wanted to open with a reference to Shrek's iconic use of this song. Initially I thought that would simply be someone slamming a door open (perhaps the shed door) but then I got to the wardrobe and it was so outhouse-like I had to use it. The door slam isn't perhaps as dramatic as I would have preferred but you work with what you've got 😂 Adding some space at the beginning was really fun; I figured that between the wide shot of the wardrobe and the title of the vid even viewers who weren't familiar with that task would be able to predict what was about to happen, and I wanted to really build up that anticipation so the release on someBODY would be satisfying.
The single easiest clips to place were Mark and Nish doing their rock star thing. Also early on I slotted Noel "decanting" the wine bottle into the climax of the bridge as kind of an easter egg for myself because it's my favorite moment in the entire show, and then I really liked how it resonated with the lyric "go for the moon" so I built the rest of the bridge around it.
"She was looking kind of dumb" was maybe the hardest part, and one of the last lyrics I filled in - you'd think it would be trivial to find footage of people looking dumb from this show but I was very, very wary of picking a shot here that would read misogynistically or otherwise offensively. It had to be something that looked objectively dumb and silly and harmless, and not just a woman making a clueless face (I really wanted to reference the brilliance of Katherine's "play dumb" strategy when ordering pizza, but felt it didn't come across visually - but I did put the clip here as a placeholder which is probably how it made its way into the vid as the next line LOL). I'm pleased enough with Lou disguising herself as a garbage bin here, especially with the internal movement lining up remarkably well with the music and also being back to back with the previous clip of Hugh with buckets on his head and all his limbs.
I tried pretty hard not to rely blindly on lyric matches, but also to pay attention to bigger pictures like visual flow and song structure - I don't think I succeeded everywhere on that front but I do think I learned a lot, and I think the parts I put together last are stronger than the parts I put together first. I think my favorite part ended up being the whipping-the-handkerchief-from-under-the-eggs montage over the second "so much to do, so much to see, so what's wrong with taking the backstreets".
I loved that thingswithwings had mentioned that they used clips from every series in their (stellar) Taskmaster vid My Body is Your Body, so about halfway to having a full timeline I decided to do a little tally, just for kicks, and I discovered that not only had I used footage from every series (that I'd watched so far - I still hadn't seen anything past series 9 at that point lol), I'd featured about half of the candidates - fully within reach of using a clip of every one - and then I had to challenge myself to do it. With apologies to the New Year's Treat contestants; fitting 10 more contestants in with the comparatively limited Treat footage wasn't working out, so I decided to double down on the main series. Here's the final tally.
TRY YOUR BEST
AO3 link for download, etc.
try your best started out as a total shitpost and somehow became the most sincere thing I've ever made.
Going into Festivids I had the idea kicking around in my head of ironically vidding the "dark side" of Taskmaster - of taking this amazing, bright, comedic show and pulling out the weird moments, the slow ones, the ones where Alex is mistreated so thoroughly that it's actually a little concerning out of context, and doing a (hopefully humorous!) tonal shift by setting them to a slow or creepy song. And then thingswithwings specifically called out the idea of contrasting music and visuals in their letter and I knew I wanted to do a treat along those lines, though it ended up departing from the original concept lol.
try your best was born from the idea of taking the comedic failures and treating them seriously - somewhere in the song brainstorm process for my assignment I'd written down "when you try your best but you don't succeed" intending to capture a general idea, but the specific lyric wouldn't leave my head, and when I thought about the other lyrics and got to "tears stream down your face" I was like THE EGG CUP okay we're doing this.
Truthfully I'm not a big fan of this song 😂 The music is gorgeous, sad, inspiring, and then the lyrics are MOSTLY that but then they're also stuck on this concept of "I will fix your sadness with my love" - idk, it can be sweet in the right context but mostly it strikes me as unhealthy. Anyway. I used the stems from the Rock Band release of this song to cut out the second verse while fading in the acoustic guitar buildup that would normally be in it, so the electric guitar drop didn't come out of nowhere. Since I had the power, I considered erasing the "fix you" lyric and replacing it with something else - show audio? Constructed lyrics from other Coldplay songs? It would have been a fun edit but I couldn't think of anything that would be funny enough to land so I left it alone and tried my best to deemphasize that concept with the visuals.
I started by playing around with the sad parts of this song, drawing heavily from the set of clips I'd tagged "despair," and cracked myself up a lot - the egg tears went in first, quickly followed by Nish's coconut throw (which was so flawlessly timed I didn't even tweak it), the great balloon escape, and the reversing cart mishap.
At this point I'd overexposed myself a little to the clips I'd already put in, so I let it sit for almost a week while I tried to decide if it was as funny as I thought it was. Eventually I showed what I had so far to my closest friends (two of whom had introduced me to Taskmaster in the first place and one of whom had only seen the most recent series) and all of them said it was "hilarious" so I gained +10 confidence and vidded the rest of it right away lol.
Instrumental sections are historically terrifying for me but this one was SO smooth and easy I couldn't believe it. It felt really natural to take advantage of the mood shift, to go from despair and failure to success, and then to escalate that success into the joy of success. Even after watching this bridge dozens of times to tweak the timing I still feel visceral joy every time I see Tim Key celebrate a successful high five.
"When you get what you want but not what you need" turned out to be tricky; the first final draft of this vid used Mawaan's infamous helium egg for that part. It more or less worked with the lyric, but upon watching it back a day later I realized it was a pretty big mistake - in order to convey the right feeling, especially this early in the vid, I needed something that was genuinely tragic instead of ridiculously tragic. Luckily the genuine tragedy of Daisy's eggs ALMOST landing in the pan was right there, and also meant I got to pull her ecstatic victory dance (which I'd missed clipping, because I'd gone straight for the helium egg and nothing else this task lol) into the bridge later, which brought a lot of energy to that section.
One of my favorite touches was putting a desaturation effect on the sad part; the colors subtly fade in over the dark "lights will guide" section and there's a slight oversaturation when the guitar kicks in. I'd initially wanted to do all kinds of overblown slomo, shitty zoom, black and white, really over the top, extra-dramatic effects on the slow sections, but didn't trust myself to be able to make it funny in the amount of time I had to work with. Luckily I think that was the right call, especially with the tonal shift to sincere joy partway through.
I rewatched thingswithwings' My Body is Your Body today and noticed I'd accidentally created an "Alex gets wet" section in this vid that's really similar to their vid! I really hope it didn't come across to anyone like I ripped off their clip sequence because it's definitely a coincidence of "great minds think alike", and also there's only so many clips that overlap the "water" and "alex getting abused" tags lol. Honestly if I'd noticed before now I might have tried to make the sequences less similar. 😅
Lowkey I wish I'd been brave enough to get a real beta job on this vid - imo no vid has ever been made worse by a beta, and there are several clip choices I suspect could have been stronger - but I was feeling SO fragile about the concept and whether it would come across that I decided to trust my instincts rather than risk getting them muddied by someone else's opinion. I think it worked out this time but it's not something I want to get into the habit of lol.
I struggled with the title because I was not about to call it "Fix You," but the rest of the lyrics weren't sticking out to me as titleworthy. I think "try your best" was the right choice - it evokes the hopeful elements of the show and the song, while also being a reference to the despair (especially stylized in lower case), and I like that the title card ended up in such close context to the title lyric in the vid.
The response to this vid has been beyond staggering - it escaped the sphere of Festivids and did over 9k views on an unlisted Youtube video! It made it to Alex Horne himself! and all I can say is I'm so happy it resonated and honestly kinda tickled that it resonated anonymously. There's something alluring about being mysterious, no?
NEW RULES
AO3 link for download, etc.
Surprise! I also made time for this Baba is You vid!sandalwoodbox made me a surprise treat last year that I adored, so this year I knew I wanted to return the favor. I made the edit for this song right away once requests were finalized, and I had a blast! I got lucky locating the stems (every instrument on a separate track). I've always wanted to do remixing or mashups but have never gotten around to it, and having the power to smoothly cut this song down to the most relevant lyrics (including a redo of the opening and ending echo effects with different lyrics) and relayer some of the building instruments as I cut out their original sections was intoxicating. I wasn't sure the song would work without the prechoruses, but I really like how it turned out. If the edit hadn't worked out, I had briefly toyed with the idea of constructing an on-again-off-again-romance narrative around Baba and Keke - but I was so busy with my assignment that I much preferred to keep it short and simple.
Working with this footage was a huge challenge, in part because I had only played a few worlds of Baba is You, and they were on the Switch so I couldn't capture my own footage easily 😂 and also because I was knee-deep in Taskmaster clipping the whole way and only working on Baba when I needed a break. I wound up using the level editor, in beta at the time, for my credits, and a friend's copy to record a quick solution to the "Baba is You / Baba is Win" puzzle for the closing shot. Instead of playing the whole game myself I wound up scouring Youtube for Let's Play footage that was already edited down to cut out the slower bits, and luckily found one, though I had to deal with removing a face cam for some shots. (I learned a lot about masking while making this vid!) Also luckily, the parts of the game that wound up working well for the vid were the simpler levels, which were largely the opening levels I was familiar with.
I really wanted to give it a cute name and for a long time I considered [Rules] is [New], but in the end it seemed a little too clunky, and I hoped New Rules was entertaining enough in relation to the game. I don't think this vid came out as tightly polished as I would have loved it to be (mostly I would have liked to put more effort into matching Baba's position and movement across cuts), but I'm happy with it given everything. [baba] has [tribute] :)
AND THEN I GOT GIFTS. OMFG. I have already gushed about them to an almost embarrassing extent on twitter and in comments and I AM GONNA DO IT AGAIN but I will try to keep it pretty brief this time lol.
GIFTS
Magic School Bus
This was one of the only shows I watched as a child, so it left a very big impression. I discovered upon vidding a short treat for it last year that I still have an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the show, and I stubbornly requested it again this year after getting no bites last year. I'm so glad I did!
Long Way Home by ReleasingmyInsanity - This vid is simply charming; it uses a song that works on levels both literal and metaphorical, and it's perfectly edited to take advantage of both. Love these science kids and their adventures!!!
Taskmaster
As above -- I was quite fond of this show upon requesting it, despite apparently having huge gaps in my knowledge of it, and then I dove in DEEP! It's so fun that thingswithwings and I made Taskmaster vids for each other, and feels truly poetic that I was gifted this vid by the very person who unknowingly inspired me to become so deeply invested in this show 😂
Don't Stop Me Now bythingswithwings - This vid delivered EXACTLY what I love about Taskmaster: nonstop chaos and hilarity ♥ Plus it managed to include some of my absolute personal favorite moments like Joe's taskmaster portrait kisses and Mawaan's highlighter yellow nails! Also after vidding Taskmaster myself, I appreciate this vid on whole new levels. All the themed montages (gaffer tape! Alex's clipboard! hopping! balloons! and so many more!) and match cuts that take such a deep knowledge of the series to put together! The way it uses the stage sections in all their joy, something I couldn't figure out how to do gracefully! BEAUTIFUL.
Outer Wilds
This game captured my heart when I played it the fall before this Festivids. I thought it would be a long shot requesting a video game fandom for Festivids, especially a small one, but this game made me feel things like it was 2019 again and I thought that maybe if I pitched it well enough, someone else would play it and that would make me happy even if nobody made a vid. I went absolutely wild (gasping, screaming into a pillow, capslocking in the chat) when I noticed that "Outer Wilds (1)" had shown up in the fandoms tagset. I NEVER dreamed that there would eventually be TWO OUTER WILDS FESTIVIDS, and that they would both be amazing works of art!!
D U S K byniyalune - I can't stop watching this vid. It's a VIBE. It feels like someone who loves something sharing their favorite parts with you. It feels like a gently guided tour of this fictional solar system. It's lovely. It gives me FEELINGS, which I am often allergic to (watery eyes, runny nose, the whole deal), but in this case the feelings are gentle and loving and relaxing, and I love that it makes this solar system feel like a cozy place where nothing bad ever happens, but without losing the dark mysterious edge.
Hurry Hurry bymarah_sarie and runjump - I can't stop watching this vid either 😂 It feels like this vid was made specifically for me and my taste -- OH WAIT, IT'S FESTIVIDS AND IT WAS!!! Stunning and humbling. The song is an unbelievably perfect choice and there is SO much joy and humor and love for the little moments you get playing this game infused throughout the vid. Time loops! Autopilot failures! Jetpack navigating! Burnt marshmallows! The Hearthians! YOU DESTROYED THE FABRIC OF SPACETIME (what a mess). Not to even MENTION the technical brilliance of this vid with the timing and the match cuts and the use of lyrics. I simply could not love this vid more.
Final thought: I love how personal Festivids is! It reminds me of some of my early art forum experiences that I miss deeply on today's internet and I find it so inspiring. Until next year! ♥
My approach to offering Festivids fandoms is "offer everything in the tagset that I love the most and let fate decide the rest". This year fate spun me
thingswithwings, whom I matched with on Taskmaster UK! I adore their vids so I was excited and a little nervous haha. Taskmaster was one of the fandoms I requested as well as offered - I was introduced to the show when I lived with two friends for a brief period in late 2020, and quickly fell in love with the ridiculous antics and low-stakes competition. I threw a roaringly successful Taskmaster-themed zoom party for my birthday where my friends and I made each other recreate memes and sculpt dinosaurs and drink weird cocktails and the like - A+ experience, highly recommend it.
Now please understand: if you'd asked me in, say, October 2021, "Hey Kat, how much of Taskmaster have you seen?" I would have said "I dunno, most of it!"
It turned out I'd seen 9 episodes out of 106. (Plus an awful lot of individual tasks and highlights compilations on Youtube, so it's totally understandable that it felt like more LOL).
Did I do the sensible thing and get started right away? Nope! Did I come up with a vid idea that was reasonably limited in scope? Nope! Did I pivot to one of the other delightful (and shorter!!) fandoms thingswithwings compellingly pitched in their letter? Nope, although I played the video game 80 Days they requested and thought about it! Instead I spent November obsessing over potential treats and nonvid projects, (and also struggling with a huge amount of seasonal and existential depression that didn't help), and FINALLY at the beginning of December I realized that a Big Challenging Creative Project was exactly what I wanted and needed and settled in to watch AND clip BASICALLY ALL of Taskmaster. Go Big or Go Home, right? ;)
It was all-encompassing. I beamed so much British comedy directly into my brain that I started ending sentences with "innit?" in my head. (Go ahead, ask me if I have a favorite British linguistic quirk now.) I crocheted an entire dress while watching. I laughed, I cried (with laughter). Unlike last year, where I successfully kept my festivids work under wraps until reveals, I was so deep into Taskmaster and Taskmaster clipping that I could not shut up about it and all of my vidder friends and some of my non-vidder friends knew exactly what I was making and how it was going at all times. I had three different files going with song brainstorms. I couldn't believe I could only dig up four existing Taskmaster fanvids (three on AO3 and one deep on Youtube) so the pressure to choose the right song felt immense, since so few of them had been used already!
I'd never made a vid anywhere NEAR the scope of "all of Taskmaster." I'm pretty new to vidding (I made my first vid ever in September 2020), and all the vids I'd made so far were extremely limited in scope - either from a limited (movie-length) canon or focusing narrowly on one or two characters from a larger canon. But I knew that I would love to make at least one gen Taskmaster tribute, and I knew that the best way to do it was to watch EVERYTHING - if only so I didn't embarrass myself by missing an obvious lyric match! Plus I think Taskmaster is an intimidating but relatively gentle show to clip; it's easy to skim large portions, like stage sections or certain tasks, if they don't seem promising, and still have plenty of great footage even if you miss something good.
Learning to use Da Vinci Resolve's keyword tagging system for clips was life- and vid-saving (thank you
sandalwoodbox)! In the end I'd say I clipped about half of Taskmaster as thoroughly as I wanted to, and by then I knew a little more about what I was looking for, (and also I was very much running out of time,) so I was faster and more selective about the later seasons, often hunting down moments from my memory instead of going through episodes and adding clips to the database. This came back to bite me a little when making a treat later - the seasons I underclipped are dramatically underrepresented compared to the seasons I clipped thoroughly. I do hope to go back and finish my clipping database before making any future Taskmaster vids :)Having an assigned buddy through the new buddy system was awesome! I liked having someone anonymous-safe to chat to and stay on track with, and giving and getting sneak previews of our vids was really fun, and I LOVED conspiring for treats after assignments were due, plus it was a huge bonus that they were friends with my recipient lol. I handed off a list of the most glorious and filthy Taskmaster clips I'd discovered but didn't know how to use to
chagrined, who added some of their own and put them to LEGENDARY use in a treat vid we both knew thingswithwings would appreciate. I was thrilled to enable something that leaned into their delights a little more specifically than the Taskmaster vids I felt capable of making lol.Last year I did a small Festivids watch party with a few friends, which was delightful, and this year I did the big Festivids watch party on the community discord, which was delightful. I loved being shown every vid, especially the ones I wouldn't have bothered to watch myself, and I loved the stream setup even when my ISP was being dumb about it, and I loved feeling like I was growing closer to the community in real time.
Specific vid notes:
ALL STAR
AO3 link for download, etc.
The second I cut out the clip of Mel actually making the shape of an L on her forehead was the second I knew what song I was picking for my assignment. All Star actually came up relatively early in my song brainstorming and I was like "but the lyrics are so specific and it would be underwhelming not to nail them," and then suddenly I had my solution for the most specific lyric in the song and it was a done deal. I sent a screenshot of her to some friends like "guess which song I picked?" and they all guessed All Star correctly. lol
I immediately knew I wanted to open with a reference to Shrek's iconic use of this song. Initially I thought that would simply be someone slamming a door open (perhaps the shed door) but then I got to the wardrobe and it was so outhouse-like I had to use it. The door slam isn't perhaps as dramatic as I would have preferred but you work with what you've got 😂 Adding some space at the beginning was really fun; I figured that between the wide shot of the wardrobe and the title of the vid even viewers who weren't familiar with that task would be able to predict what was about to happen, and I wanted to really build up that anticipation so the release on someBODY would be satisfying.
The single easiest clips to place were Mark and Nish doing their rock star thing. Also early on I slotted Noel "decanting" the wine bottle into the climax of the bridge as kind of an easter egg for myself because it's my favorite moment in the entire show, and then I really liked how it resonated with the lyric "go for the moon" so I built the rest of the bridge around it.
"She was looking kind of dumb" was maybe the hardest part, and one of the last lyrics I filled in - you'd think it would be trivial to find footage of people looking dumb from this show but I was very, very wary of picking a shot here that would read misogynistically or otherwise offensively. It had to be something that looked objectively dumb and silly and harmless, and not just a woman making a clueless face (I really wanted to reference the brilliance of Katherine's "play dumb" strategy when ordering pizza, but felt it didn't come across visually - but I did put the clip here as a placeholder which is probably how it made its way into the vid as the next line LOL). I'm pleased enough with Lou disguising herself as a garbage bin here, especially with the internal movement lining up remarkably well with the music and also being back to back with the previous clip of Hugh with buckets on his head and all his limbs.
I tried pretty hard not to rely blindly on lyric matches, but also to pay attention to bigger pictures like visual flow and song structure - I don't think I succeeded everywhere on that front but I do think I learned a lot, and I think the parts I put together last are stronger than the parts I put together first. I think my favorite part ended up being the whipping-the-handkerchief-from-under-the-eggs montage over the second "so much to do, so much to see, so what's wrong with taking the backstreets".
I loved that thingswithwings had mentioned that they used clips from every series in their (stellar) Taskmaster vid My Body is Your Body, so about halfway to having a full timeline I decided to do a little tally, just for kicks, and I discovered that not only had I used footage from every series (that I'd watched so far - I still hadn't seen anything past series 9 at that point lol), I'd featured about half of the candidates - fully within reach of using a clip of every one - and then I had to challenge myself to do it. With apologies to the New Year's Treat contestants; fitting 10 more contestants in with the comparatively limited Treat footage wasn't working out, so I decided to double down on the main series. Here's the final tally.
TRY YOUR BEST
AO3 link for download, etc.
try your best started out as a total shitpost and somehow became the most sincere thing I've ever made.
Going into Festivids I had the idea kicking around in my head of ironically vidding the "dark side" of Taskmaster - of taking this amazing, bright, comedic show and pulling out the weird moments, the slow ones, the ones where Alex is mistreated so thoroughly that it's actually a little concerning out of context, and doing a (hopefully humorous!) tonal shift by setting them to a slow or creepy song. And then thingswithwings specifically called out the idea of contrasting music and visuals in their letter and I knew I wanted to do a treat along those lines, though it ended up departing from the original concept lol.
try your best was born from the idea of taking the comedic failures and treating them seriously - somewhere in the song brainstorm process for my assignment I'd written down "when you try your best but you don't succeed" intending to capture a general idea, but the specific lyric wouldn't leave my head, and when I thought about the other lyrics and got to "tears stream down your face" I was like THE EGG CUP okay we're doing this.
Truthfully I'm not a big fan of this song 😂 The music is gorgeous, sad, inspiring, and then the lyrics are MOSTLY that but then they're also stuck on this concept of "I will fix your sadness with my love" - idk, it can be sweet in the right context but mostly it strikes me as unhealthy. Anyway. I used the stems from the Rock Band release of this song to cut out the second verse while fading in the acoustic guitar buildup that would normally be in it, so the electric guitar drop didn't come out of nowhere. Since I had the power, I considered erasing the "fix you" lyric and replacing it with something else - show audio? Constructed lyrics from other Coldplay songs? It would have been a fun edit but I couldn't think of anything that would be funny enough to land so I left it alone and tried my best to deemphasize that concept with the visuals.
I started by playing around with the sad parts of this song, drawing heavily from the set of clips I'd tagged "despair," and cracked myself up a lot - the egg tears went in first, quickly followed by Nish's coconut throw (which was so flawlessly timed I didn't even tweak it), the great balloon escape, and the reversing cart mishap.
At this point I'd overexposed myself a little to the clips I'd already put in, so I let it sit for almost a week while I tried to decide if it was as funny as I thought it was. Eventually I showed what I had so far to my closest friends (two of whom had introduced me to Taskmaster in the first place and one of whom had only seen the most recent series) and all of them said it was "hilarious" so I gained +10 confidence and vidded the rest of it right away lol.
Instrumental sections are historically terrifying for me but this one was SO smooth and easy I couldn't believe it. It felt really natural to take advantage of the mood shift, to go from despair and failure to success, and then to escalate that success into the joy of success. Even after watching this bridge dozens of times to tweak the timing I still feel visceral joy every time I see Tim Key celebrate a successful high five.
"When you get what you want but not what you need" turned out to be tricky; the first final draft of this vid used Mawaan's infamous helium egg for that part. It more or less worked with the lyric, but upon watching it back a day later I realized it was a pretty big mistake - in order to convey the right feeling, especially this early in the vid, I needed something that was genuinely tragic instead of ridiculously tragic. Luckily the genuine tragedy of Daisy's eggs ALMOST landing in the pan was right there, and also meant I got to pull her ecstatic victory dance (which I'd missed clipping, because I'd gone straight for the helium egg and nothing else this task lol) into the bridge later, which brought a lot of energy to that section.
One of my favorite touches was putting a desaturation effect on the sad part; the colors subtly fade in over the dark "lights will guide" section and there's a slight oversaturation when the guitar kicks in. I'd initially wanted to do all kinds of overblown slomo, shitty zoom, black and white, really over the top, extra-dramatic effects on the slow sections, but didn't trust myself to be able to make it funny in the amount of time I had to work with. Luckily I think that was the right call, especially with the tonal shift to sincere joy partway through.
I rewatched thingswithwings' My Body is Your Body today and noticed I'd accidentally created an "Alex gets wet" section in this vid that's really similar to their vid! I really hope it didn't come across to anyone like I ripped off their clip sequence because it's definitely a coincidence of "great minds think alike", and also there's only so many clips that overlap the "water" and "alex getting abused" tags lol. Honestly if I'd noticed before now I might have tried to make the sequences less similar. 😅
Lowkey I wish I'd been brave enough to get a real beta job on this vid - imo no vid has ever been made worse by a beta, and there are several clip choices I suspect could have been stronger - but I was feeling SO fragile about the concept and whether it would come across that I decided to trust my instincts rather than risk getting them muddied by someone else's opinion. I think it worked out this time but it's not something I want to get into the habit of lol.
I struggled with the title because I was not about to call it "Fix You," but the rest of the lyrics weren't sticking out to me as titleworthy. I think "try your best" was the right choice - it evokes the hopeful elements of the show and the song, while also being a reference to the despair (especially stylized in lower case), and I like that the title card ended up in such close context to the title lyric in the vid.
The response to this vid has been beyond staggering - it escaped the sphere of Festivids and did over 9k views on an unlisted Youtube video! It made it to Alex Horne himself! and all I can say is I'm so happy it resonated and honestly kinda tickled that it resonated anonymously. There's something alluring about being mysterious, no?
NEW RULES
AO3 link for download, etc.
Surprise! I also made time for this Baba is You vid!
sandalwoodbox made me a surprise treat last year that I adored, so this year I knew I wanted to return the favor. I made the edit for this song right away once requests were finalized, and I had a blast! I got lucky locating the stems (every instrument on a separate track). I've always wanted to do remixing or mashups but have never gotten around to it, and having the power to smoothly cut this song down to the most relevant lyrics (including a redo of the opening and ending echo effects with different lyrics) and relayer some of the building instruments as I cut out their original sections was intoxicating. I wasn't sure the song would work without the prechoruses, but I really like how it turned out. If the edit hadn't worked out, I had briefly toyed with the idea of constructing an on-again-off-again-romance narrative around Baba and Keke - but I was so busy with my assignment that I much preferred to keep it short and simple.Working with this footage was a huge challenge, in part because I had only played a few worlds of Baba is You, and they were on the Switch so I couldn't capture my own footage easily 😂 and also because I was knee-deep in Taskmaster clipping the whole way and only working on Baba when I needed a break. I wound up using the level editor, in beta at the time, for my credits, and a friend's copy to record a quick solution to the "Baba is You / Baba is Win" puzzle for the closing shot. Instead of playing the whole game myself I wound up scouring Youtube for Let's Play footage that was already edited down to cut out the slower bits, and luckily found one, though I had to deal with removing a face cam for some shots. (I learned a lot about masking while making this vid!) Also luckily, the parts of the game that wound up working well for the vid were the simpler levels, which were largely the opening levels I was familiar with.
I really wanted to give it a cute name and for a long time I considered [Rules] is [New], but in the end it seemed a little too clunky, and I hoped New Rules was entertaining enough in relation to the game. I don't think this vid came out as tightly polished as I would have loved it to be (mostly I would have liked to put more effort into matching Baba's position and movement across cuts), but I'm happy with it given everything. [baba] has [tribute] :)
AND THEN I GOT GIFTS. OMFG. I have already gushed about them to an almost embarrassing extent on twitter and in comments and I AM GONNA DO IT AGAIN but I will try to keep it pretty brief this time lol.
GIFTS
Magic School Bus
This was one of the only shows I watched as a child, so it left a very big impression. I discovered upon vidding a short treat for it last year that I still have an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the show, and I stubbornly requested it again this year after getting no bites last year. I'm so glad I did!
Long Way Home by ReleasingmyInsanity - This vid is simply charming; it uses a song that works on levels both literal and metaphorical, and it's perfectly edited to take advantage of both. Love these science kids and their adventures!!!
Taskmaster
As above -- I was quite fond of this show upon requesting it, despite apparently having huge gaps in my knowledge of it, and then I dove in DEEP! It's so fun that thingswithwings and I made Taskmaster vids for each other, and feels truly poetic that I was gifted this vid by the very person who unknowingly inspired me to become so deeply invested in this show 😂
Don't Stop Me Now by
thingswithwings - This vid delivered EXACTLY what I love about Taskmaster: nonstop chaos and hilarity ♥ Plus it managed to include some of my absolute personal favorite moments like Joe's taskmaster portrait kisses and Mawaan's highlighter yellow nails! Also after vidding Taskmaster myself, I appreciate this vid on whole new levels. All the themed montages (gaffer tape! Alex's clipboard! hopping! balloons! and so many more!) and match cuts that take such a deep knowledge of the series to put together! The way it uses the stage sections in all their joy, something I couldn't figure out how to do gracefully! BEAUTIFUL.Outer Wilds
This game captured my heart when I played it the fall before this Festivids. I thought it would be a long shot requesting a video game fandom for Festivids, especially a small one, but this game made me feel things like it was 2019 again and I thought that maybe if I pitched it well enough, someone else would play it and that would make me happy even if nobody made a vid. I went absolutely wild (gasping, screaming into a pillow, capslocking in the chat) when I noticed that "Outer Wilds (1)" had shown up in the fandoms tagset. I NEVER dreamed that there would eventually be TWO OUTER WILDS FESTIVIDS, and that they would both be amazing works of art!!
D U S K by
niyalune - I can't stop watching this vid. It's a VIBE. It feels like someone who loves something sharing their favorite parts with you. It feels like a gently guided tour of this fictional solar system. It's lovely. It gives me FEELINGS, which I am often allergic to (watery eyes, runny nose, the whole deal), but in this case the feelings are gentle and loving and relaxing, and I love that it makes this solar system feel like a cozy place where nothing bad ever happens, but without losing the dark mysterious edge.Hurry Hurry by
marah_sarie and runjump - I can't stop watching this vid either 😂 It feels like this vid was made specifically for me and my taste -- OH WAIT, IT'S FESTIVIDS AND IT WAS!!! Stunning and humbling. The song is an unbelievably perfect choice and there is SO much joy and humor and love for the little moments you get playing this game infused throughout the vid. Time loops! Autopilot failures! Jetpack navigating! Burnt marshmallows! The Hearthians! YOU DESTROYED THE FABRIC OF SPACETIME (what a mess). Not to even MENTION the technical brilliance of this vid with the timing and the match cuts and the use of lyrics. I simply could not love this vid more.Final thought: I love how personal Festivids is! It reminds me of some of my early art forum experiences that I miss deeply on today's internet and I find it so inspiring. Until next year! ♥
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