i have decided: this is my vidding icon.

[some_stars]

Devotion

Music: by the Indigo Girls
Fandom: Heroes
Character(s): Peter, Nathan
Spoilers: for all of season 2
Size: 52 MB
Notes: Oh, dear god. There are extensive and almost certainly boring notes following the links, which you are under no obligation whatsoever to read. The important part is that shati not only made this 1000% better than it would have been(and it would be a thousand times better still if I had the patience/ability to carry out all her suggestions), she pretty much enabled its existence at all by listening patiently to my Verbose and Artistic Angst.

Download: from Mediafire, or right-click-save to download from my website. You can watch it streaming at Imeem or Youtube.

God, I spent a month on this, which--it's a long time for ME, anyway. Especially to be working on something continually; I spent some of that time on the as-yet-unposted Audrey vid but mostly it has been a December of Petrellis. And those fuckers are complicated. My running joke with myself was that the vid was about "Peter, Nathan, and the UNCERTAIN PUNCTUATION in between." Is it a slash vid? I still have no idea, really. But I knew from the start it would have to include Angela and Claire and Heidi, because even if it is a Petrellicest vid, that still means it's about the family--all of them.

And, well. Once you add in clips of Heidi and the kids, there's a pretty unavoidable slant, and I didn't exactly try hard to avoid it. The one thing I desperately did NOT want was to end up with a vid that read as, "Peter and Nathan choose each other over their wife/girlfriends! Boo and/or Yay depending on your proclivities!"

(I could go on and on and on talking about this and taking it apart, but that is interesting to no one besides me, so you're all spared.)

On the more technical side, I am still boggled by how much I learned in the course of one vid. Things I tried for the first time, whether or not they made it to the final draft:

1. Using an image mask
2. Using two image masks at once, with different effects on each
3. Fades, blurs, and overlays--oh my god, I was TERRIFIED of fades. I still am, really; god only knows when I'll get the hang of making them look less artificial, but at least I've gotten over my initial blind phobia.
4. Reversing a clip
5. Flipping a clip horizontally
6. Doing a title sequence that's more than words on black background, albeit a very simple one that I eventually tossed for excessive melodrama
7. The sheer degree of nonlinearity--second season, up through first season, second season footage "from" the end of first season, back and forth throughout first season, back and forth through second season then to the end, and back all the way to the beginning of first. I mean, just putting clips next to each other whose relationship contains absolutely no element of "and then this happened"--I think I was trying to get at this with the last vid but linearity eventually ruled, and of course this one does have a narrative based on "this caused that" but it's so much less bound by it. I hope. *g*

--I also did a tiny bit of messing with color, but most of my experimentation there is happening in the Audrey vid, because otherwise I really would have gone insane. This vid is so much bigger than my actual head, it's just ridiculous.

As always, I welcome/beg for criticism. I'm still feeling my way around vidding generally, and I tried a lot of new things in this vid both narratively and technically, so if you have any thoughts of any kind I would be grateful to hear them. :)