Some sort of pheonix

It's kind of scary, seeing all this roughcut video. Before the color treatment, before effects, before the polish. I'm editing for hours trying to find just the perfect solution to an interior problem of structure and story and I sit back for a second and I think, what if I can't make this as cool as I want to? Which is a fair question because - and here's the secret truth - often, I can't make it as awesome as I want to. There's not enough time or money or footage or power or whatever to fully realize my dreams.

But here's the next thing - and this bears remembering - it always does turn out great in its own way. Sometimes according to plan and sometimes with a bit of serendipity, all the filming and planning and conceptualization and talking and thinking comes together into something that's neat. I'd do well to keep this in mind right now during this phase where everything is rough and half-together and crazy and chaotic.

I was thinking of all this when I was sent to this music video. It makes me cringe - no rhymed meter in that music? No continuity of story? What's with the narrator's diction? Oh yes, it's bad. To quote Kotaku, "In fact, it is bad. Its badness is the stuff of immediate legend. It is so bad that it comes all the way around and becomes good, then rams its way back into wretchedness before emerging from its own wreckage like some sort of phoenix." But you know what else? I love this. It's LARPers realizing their dream of making an epic heavy rock-opera fantasy music video. These guys likely had a really great time doing this video - and why shouldn't they?! I guess what I'm saying is this video is a cautionary tale - there but for the grace of god, many years of schooling in traditional filmmaking techniques, inherent grasp of story structure, the ability to know when things have gone Too Far and meticulous editing go I.



Rock on, dudes. And back to my editing of the minutia because in the end, the cohesion of this story combined with the pure joy captured as we were shooting is gonna make the Eldren music video excellent.