This is a highlights section with commentary. New vids will appear at the top.
For the 2023 vid_bingo same song challenge. The song was Vienna Teng - Level Up.
My actual vote was for the other contender, Hey Brother by Avicii (with the intent of making a Clone Wars vid where each "There's nothing in this world I wouldn't do" is illustrated by Anakin doing dark deeds as a way of pointing out that "There's nothing in this world I wouldn't do" is not, actually, a comforting line), but when it was clear that one was losing, I listened to the victorious finalist on repeat. I was traveling and on my non-vidding-capable laptop, so I had no way of laying down test clips, only my imagination. Then, I got an idea to do it about the Jedi Consular story in SWTOR, and relistened to the song with that in mind.
I knew I wanted to do some sort of compositing to reflect the nature of the beat, and I wanted to do some zoom-in overlay as well. I decided to introduce both of them separately and then join them together in the end. I didn't want to call the thing "Level Up", since, uh, that would be a bit too facile imo, considering the video game nature of the source. The lyric "begin again" struck out at me, especially since I'd already decided to make the vid sort of /\-shaped, and in the end, the Consular goes and gets people to begin again. It's also a bit of a nod to the Zen Buddhist concept of 初心 shoshin, an attitude of openness, eagerness, and lack of preconceptions when studying a subject, even at an advanced level; lit. "beginner's mind".
It does not quite look like I expected it to look – I discovered alpha masks in kdenlive, and realized I liked the soft edges I could thus make better than the hard edges of just simple compositing, and I also realized I wanted differences in size, with some things at original, not just everything at 50% and aligned with a corner. I did still do compositing with transform + alpha masks and even made a custom mask for one bit!
As for what everything ~means~, well, hopefully you can get that just from watching. (Actually, if you've gotten this far and haven't, please do before continuing; I'd like to hear your unbiased reactions.)
In general, the theme of the vid is "people the Consular helped/could save". I mirrored footage so she'd be mostly on the right, looking left, with the reversal of that symbolizing her being on the back foot.
For the very start, I wanted to a) start on Tython and b) set things up. So Yuon Par and Syo Bakarn have brief appearances (Yuon for the first So come out) before we move to Nalen Raloch, the Tython end boss. He is done with all the talk, yes, but what he needs to listen to is his heart.
Then we move to ch 1 and the plagued masters plot. For the first chorus (If you are afraid, come out), we go to Coruscant: mostly plot rehash, but we sure did save that guy who'd had a noetikon implanted in him. First level up is healing Yuon Par the first time. We proceed with the rest of the masters who had a whole planet for them; I considered chronological order, but dynamite the dam on the flow was much more Master Duras Fain than Master Cin Tykan, and we are all cinders / of a fire burning long ago vice versa. Plus this way I could use Master Cin's padawan for the bit about his own heart. Master Eriz Vossan obviously fit If you are afraid, come forth, and Master Sidonie Garen wasn't a terrible fit for the remaining lyric.
Everybody here has loved and lost – this is the bit where I got to introduce the zoom-in overlay. I gave each of the people healed during ch 1 their own word (Cin Tykan, Duras Fain, Laranna Fain, Eriz Vossan, Sidonie Garen, Yuon Par), during which I took a clip of the Force shielding ritual and used that as an overlay (second shielding for Yuon) while rapidly swapping over a clip of their face for each beat. I ended with Yuon Par, then transitioned to Yuon being possessed by Vivicar, then to Vivicar when the music changed.
Level up and love again – I knew from the start this would be about Vivicar/Parkanis Tark. I was a bit worried about having enough footage, but thankfully there was enough to make it work, even if this video game's cutscenes are 99% of people talking at each other. I really like how your day number one in the rest of forever ended up looking.
Then, with the next chorus, came the transition to chapter 2. The whole ship sequence at the start fit the lyrics of the first bit.
Everybody here has seams and scars – the theme here is "people the Consular did a solid in ch 2". In order: Representative Alani, Miel Muwn, Tai Cordan, Shuuru, Senator Grell, Syo Bakarn, the Chancellor, the cyborg guy on Balmorra, Zenith, Felix, the Sarkhai royal couple. I had lots of fun putting Syo on "seams" and Zenith and Felix on "scars". The overlays are Darth Lachris's apprentice realizing he can walk away, a freed member of the Balmorran resistance bowing, the Consular healing a surrendered Imperial soldier, the Consular giving Felix's squad a pep talk, the Consular telling Felix to treat their Imperial POW according to the rules, and a Selkath scientist who almost got murdered by Imps.
Then the music changes at So what? Level up! and for this instrumental bridge, I wanted to introduce more compositing. The ship accelerating I knew would be there from the start, but the rest is one of the last bits conceived. (Incuts: Masterhood ceremony, Force lifting the psych droid on Belsavis, yeeting Gaden-Ko to safety, looking around on Belsavis, various bits of saving Esh-Kha on Belsavis. Belsavis, like Taris, had some top-notch cutscenes. Voss less so.)
Let your faith die – Nadia loses her father and has to be consoled.
And this is all we need – discovery that Syo is actually the First Son. Note the reversal of where the Consular is standing for the first part: she's disheartened by this discovery about her mentor, but then gets a grip and is back on the right side of the screen.
Outro, part 1 – confrontation with Syo in the caverns. Again, I was a bit worried about not having enough footage, but I had to crop this twice so I could fit in the meditating together and the Consular making a holocron of her journeys.
Outro, part 2 ("warm part") – returning to the beginning, with cool footage presented in reverse chronological order! Planets: Corellia, Voss, Belsavis, Hoth, Balmorra, Alderaan, Tatooine, Taris. (Plus an interlude with Duranna Fain's ship.) (Skipped: Quesh, Nar Shaddaa, Coruscant.) This is the maximalist visual feast, with multiple images onscreen at a time + a zoom overlay atop them all.
Outro, part 3 ("heartbeat") – Tython. The music became simple, so the visuals had to be as well. All the clips here are in reverse chronological order, too. Then I ended with doing a /meditate in one of the first zones on Tython, faded in the credits, and faded to white because that seemed most fitting.
This one was my free vid for Vexercises' 2022 round.
Now, way back when I was watching AotC for the first time and liveblogging my reactions in chat, my dear friend phyrry told me they wanted a vid about Padmé set to Common People by Pulp. When the free vid challenge came, I read the text about expanding a previous vid to full length and decided to extend my The Wind That Shapes the Land pechakucha to its full length and do another pechakucha 2 ways, this time with a full-length song!
Then I looked at the song's length. It is over 8 minutes long. It is possible to vid that, but I would need to bring my Consular, currently done with Chapter 3 and no further, through multiple expansions, record all of that, and sort through the footage. I did not have anywhere near the time to do that.
So I panicked for a minute before realizing that hey, this was the perfect excuse to do that Common People vid! A bit of searching around revealed a bunch of covers. After some listening, I decreed the William Shatner version my favorite, to my great surprise, and 100% of respondents thought that I should vid to that one if I liked it better. So I made a class critique vid of Padmé Amidala to Common People by William Shatner. It goes harder than the original, imo, and I liked the opportunity to, well, dig out that Padmé is the sort of rich that never wears the same clothes twice and even her refugee disguise is more Moderately Successful Businesswoman than anything that actually looks like a poor person. She exudes wealth and filthy richness. Her idea of going into hiding is one of her family's private estates with servants. She is filthy rich. Anakin was born into slavery. (I also featured Shmi's death and touched upon George Lucas's ???? idea of starting the Grand Epic Romance when one of the participants was nine. You have been forewarned.) The vid is not kind to Padmé, but tbh, fandom is often overly kind to her and other rich characters.
Technique-wise, I sort of wanted to do some mouth-flap matching for the speaky bits (so it comes across as, if not the characters actually having the dialogue, then Anakin doing a voiceover reminiscence of what happened over scenes of the thing happening) and then going for a more traditional vid-y direction for the singy bits. The titular common people were Anakin, Shmi, and the Larses; Padmé was the clueless rich girlfriend. It was also important to me to have the first "I want to live like common people" come from Padmé as Queen Amidala, making a royal decree, to really dig it in. I used podracing as a stand-in for the pool and smoking, as there was footage available for it, and it works as a blood sport: Anakin, a slave, risks his neck for material benefit of the rich Queen, but has also been sent to compete just for the entertainment of others – yet what else is there to do on Tatooine than watch the pod races?
Return to the vid index