I’ve finished with Davinci Resolve for the moment while I research and write the next essay (1 book to read, 1 movie to watch, 3 games to play/record). To relax of a Sunday afternoon, I decided to load up Photoshop and do some colouring for the first time in a long (relatively) time.
I got a new, larger drawing slate for Christmas, so I don’t have to zoom in as far for snalled brushstrokes which is good. It’s also less fiddly overall. My only problem is, there’s something about working in layers and clipping masks I seem to have a mental block on. I know they make things easier when you use them right, but I seem to keep moving layers, attaching and removing clipping masks through the whole process. I guess I’ll just keep at it until something clicks. Still, this was the end result, which I can’t complain about.
Only two weeks between videos this time! Writing remains the hardest point of the process, but keeping video in mind to illustrate it at the same time is becoming habitual. The actual editing and voiceover recording come a lot easier, just working on improving sound design. Messing around with tonal sound effects, which means using music in the same key throughout. I’ve got no ear for it, so I drop a few tracks into DJ software and pick whichever match. This one’s the shortest yet, but anything else would be waffling/padding. Next essay will need more research before I start pulling my chaotic list of points together. I’m not putting a deadline on myself though; this isn’t a job.
This one took far longer than I thought it would. It also came out shorter than previous videos. They’ve all been getting shorter, in fact. Maybe I have less to say or the edit is getting tighter. I recently finished reading Rick Rubin’s book “The Creative Act”, where he writes about cutting a work back as far as possible, seeing how much you can remove and still keep the essence of the work. That was definitely in mind when making the video. I’m not monetizing my videos, so hitting the 8-minuite mark to add mid-roll ads isn’t a concern. I say what I need to in order to make my point, not just in the voiceover, but the video that goes with it. I see a lot of essays that are text-first, with video clips just laid over the top that go on for 20-30 minutes. Maybe it’s because my attention span has worn away or the fact I HATE writing, but I just want to be concise. Big fan of using match cuts to make connections between movies, the “Dressed to Kil” to “Psycho” to “Fatal Attraction” one is probably the best example. Next video will also be short, but that just fell out of my head in one sitting, rather than two months building a patchwork of deas into a coherent whole. As ever, I had visual ideas (and the thumbnail) ready to go and have to write something that’s essentially captions for when I’m trying to convey. The two after that will be longer and take a while (lots of research), but I’m doing this for the process as much as the end result.
The title of this movie was a random joke on a Hammor horror podcast I listen to. Just couldn’t let it go. I spent the first 90 minutes of a Saturday morning doing this instead…
I had a basic idea for this essay for a long while back. Originally it was about the different forms sequels take, with a few examples of each. I’d even dug out the DVD’s to rip for footage, but as I wrote the thing, “The Matrix Resurrections” just took over. There’s so much going on with it, the other stuff just fell into the intro.
It’s something Rick Rubin mentions in the book I’m reading, “The Creative Act”, “The work reveals itself as you go”. I‘ve definitely realised this, as I hack away from scribbled notes and random concepts to bullet points and eventually a mostly-coherent essay. I hate writing and it takes weeks on end to come up with 1400 words, but they change as I go.
Even as I’m writing, the video part starts to take shape. The final edit of the text is on the timeline in Resolve, cutting and shifting lines of the voiceover. I could never just work in prose, the video illustrates what I’m trying to articulate so much more easily.
Next essay will be a way off. I’ve got the basic idea, but there’s a stack of movies to watch (plus a re-read of “Heart of Darkness”). We’ll see what it actually turns into.
In the meantime, it looks like I’ll be playing around with a poster idea in Photoshop.
I was working on the next video essay (about movie sequels) and – surprise! – got sidetracked. This time it was movie trailers, specifically the editing and structure. The essay centers around “The Matrix Resurrections”, so I pretty much know the movie backwards and forwards at this point.
It was a good way of learning some more functions in DaVince Resolve, especially with sound design, plus how the structure of a trailer works. This was done with royalty-free music and sound effects, got to avoid those YouTube copyright strikes.
Uploaded on a Tuesday night, woke up to 400+ views, which makes it my most-watched video. Picked up a couple of subscribers, too. Hilariously, the first comment was “Why have you bothered to make this?!”. So tempted to just reply, “Fun”.
Sometimes it’s tricky to pin down where an idea actually comes from. I don’t mean the end product, but the original spark. I don’t really have that lightbulb-goes-on “Aha!” moment. Maybe it’s just from following so many YouTube-algorithm rabbit-holes. I was playing around with Photoshop, all my recommendations seemed to be on making Brutalist-style posters (I guess that’s what the cool kids are into). Somehow that changed into making a vintage-looking t-shirt design.
Being a Gen-X’er, it’s been inevitable I fell for the nostalgia trends happening now. Accepted wisdom seems to be it’s roughly 20 years, but the Synthwave and Vectorheart I’m into run a little further back. I can now add nostalgia for VHS-era anime to the list.
I can’t get into the post-Pokemon/One Piece PG era we’re in now (if I hear the word “Isekai” one more time, I will go crazy and take you all with me). Give me the pre-Internet era, before the Sub vs Dub debate when you couldn’t choose which you got. Give me the gratuitous violence and swearing of Manga Video. Give me “Ninja Scroll”. Give me “Fist of the North Star”. Give me “Cyber City Oedo 808”, which I got on Blu-Ray a while back and loved as much as when I taped it of Channel 4, back in the pre-historic past.
This is what I made the t-shirt design of. Not like there’s a lot of merch out there. The character art rules, but the logo is just generic text, so I found a YouTube tutorial on retro text and T-shirt design. Downloaded a copy of the character art from the cover of the Blu-Ray. A couple of hours later, I had this:
Damn, even the shoulder pads are cool.
Had a T-shirt printed with it on that came out… OK. Still, a fun project I might retry with a different subject at some point.
I finally finished my second video essay, after another several months. Read and listened to it so many times the words lost all meaning, but the edit came together a lot easier this time.
Posted it and a my subscription feed had a video on the exact topic I’ve been planning for the next essay. Watched it and it turned out to be a compilation, missing the final movie in the series.
Will probably still make mine, but take a break to to something a little simpler first. Maybe finally setting this site up.
I’ve been using DaVinci Resolve to make black-and-white versions of movies for a while now. It span out of my photography, trying to see more in that way for composition and lighting. I started with “The Shadow” (1994) and “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow” (2004), partially because they were also more period-appropriate that way. They also look look better than the original versions. There’ve been a few official black-and-white releases in the last few years; “Mad Mad: Fury Road”, “Logan Noir” and even a new version of “Johnny Mnemonic”. That last one never got a release in the UK, so I took the extended Japanese cut that was uploaded onto the Internet Archive and converted that. I found that even if black-and-white didn’t change a movie much visually, it made a difference in… I hate to use this word… the “vibe”. “The Faculty” becomes a real 50’s throwback, “The Usual Suspects” noir leanings even more pronounced. I’m a (low-key) defender of “Alien Vs Predator” (2004) on this basis. As a main entry in either series, it’s a bad movie. If you see it as a throwback to the old monster mash-ups of the 40’s and 50’s, it’s a fun time. It’s not an accident an on-screen TV is showing “Frankenstein meets the Wolfman”. I took the conversion a couple of steps further than usual in Resolve. Not just monochrome, but film grain throughout and dirt during the prologue. I changer the sound to mono and even swapped in the 50’s version of the Fox fanfare (with a “Presented in Cinemascope” title). Since it was shot on film, it looks really good in a way I never appreciated in colour. There’s great use of shadow to give a haunted house quality to the setting. A few days after I finished it, I started thinking about what the poster for a vintage release would have looked like… so I ended up watching a bunch of YouTube videos and started up Photoshop. I took the cover of the origin AvP comic for the main art and grabbed a couple of stills of the main characters from IMDB. It’s not perfect, but a fun way to learn some new stuff in Photoshop (and I’ve still got a lot left to learn).
The Bungie plagiarism incident last week (their 4th, apparently) has led me to a new discovery. The most interesting part of the new Marathon game, the art style, has been partially lifted from an outside artist. The whole style is really cool, and reminds me of the old Designer’s Republic style in the 90’s. Back in an era of physical media I’d pore over the liner notes of PWEI albums, looking for little Easter Egg jokes and references. The WipEout games were the coolest shit ever, the racing was tight and soundtracks were all bangers. The graphic design even extended to the menus.
Turns out this is now a whole aesthetic, called “Vectorheart”. I know 90’s / Millennial nostalgia is the thing right now, but this has been around for a while and I’m here for it, as they (used to?) say.
