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.
I really like the early years of the CW “Arrow-verse” TV shows (Arrow, The Flash, etc). Not every episode was a classic, but they nailed a lighter tone to the Snyder movies. They also did annual cross-over stories, including a version of “Crisis on Infinite Earths”. The first one “Invasion!” was a fairly successful attempt but fell between two stools of standalone story and ongoing series episodes. The DVD’s of these crossovers are just the individual episodes on a disc, with ad break pauses and episode recaps. So my sudden, out-of-nowhere thought was to edit “Invasion!” into one single movie-length story.
I ripped the DVD, opened DaVinci Resolve and imported the episodes. I hit my first snag in seconds. Each episode still had credits burned into the lower-third of the early scenes. This might be OK in the first episode, but I can’t have them show up again at the start of the second and third acts, so I was going to have to crop them out. I set the project to a 2.40 aspect ratio, which worked on all but one credit (which I did a slight zoom on). That meant I had to treat the entire thing as an open matte and go through the whole 2 hours re-framing every single shot. I accidentally put in 2 hours of my Friday night starting the process, only finally shutting the PC down to make dinner.
Saturday was a lovely sunny day. I thought I’d make the most of it, going to the gym and having an al-fresco lunch. Had to be home by mid-afternoon to get family dinner in the slow cooker though, so I was at a loose end by 3pm. Well, I might as well do a little more editing…
Four hours pass.
Never noticed it, just locked into the timeline. I’d reframed two episodes and hit the first ad break on the last, never even getting out of my chair. I think something about editing just grabs me by the autism and refuses to let go. Scrub through shot, pick frame, set level, repeat. I keyframed a couple of tilts into camera moves as well, but that was about it.
By Sunday morning I was all in, mind was on nothing else. Hyper-fixation, I suppose. Another two hours go by, ending with creating a colour grade. Nothing too extreme (this wasn’t going to turn into Joss Whedon’s “Justice League”), but better than how basic cable looks. I set off the render job and finally went to find something else to do.
Without the recaps, end credits and a couple of non-essential scenes the whole thing now runs 1 hour 51 minutes. As in, you can watch the whole thing in on sitting. You can still kind of tell where one episode moves to the next story-wise, but flows a lot better. I can’t upload it, obviously. That sucks.
I’ve also made a start on the next one: “Crisis on Earth-X”. Four episodes of that one.
I do colouring book pages to learn Photoshop. Got a collection I scan and probably spend longer on than if I used pencils, but the results are coming out better each time. These were two of the first.
I know… Adobe is evil and we’re all supposed to be moving to open-source software, but I started out with Sketchbook, which went from free to subscription and Krita doesn’t support my Tourbox, which I can’t work without these days (for anything). I’m also still using Lightroom for photos, but at least I’m using DaVinci Resolve for video.
Cora Harper from “Mass Effect: Andromeda”.Batman, obviously.
These two books were the final motivation I needed to create a blog. Sean Tuckers’s book is a philosophical, psychological and surprisingly vulnerable exploration of the importance of making art. “Your Brain on Art” (which I’ve nearly finished…) is more about the mental benefits from a scientific standpoint. The message I’ve taken from both is simple: just create, for your own sake if nothing else.
Now we’ve moved into the “slop” era of LLM’s and “Generative AI” this has definitely struck a chord with me. I’m under no pretence that anything here will be “good”, but it will be real. There’s no overarching theme or plan to what I’m going to post here, I bounce from video essays to photography to DJ mixtapes from one day to the next (neurodivergence FTW). There might be colouring book pages in Photoshop if I’m particulary happy with the results. I’m not chasing likes or trying to please an algorithm here, just making a digital scrapbook of sorts.
