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.
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.
