Frantzo wrote: Mon Feb 12, 2024 9:14 am
By "a good faster pace", you mean fast cuts? I think I did it in both rounds with cuts of less than 0.6 sec :)
Totally agree with you although I think sometimes the contemplative and slow aspect is also interesting in StasyQ clips.
It's more than just the pace of cuts. It is also about what happens within each shot.
- Screenshot 2024-02-12 153112.png (20.99 KiB) Viewed 7243 times
If you take a look at a quick scene cut detection from
Bored, you can see that the rhythm of cuts is rather quick. The pace of the cuts is usually tied a lot to the music, because there's a strong suggestion to cut to a beat. From a quick glance, my critique would be that there's a lot of monotonicity to the cuts. Throughout, all the cuts are quite predictable. You might want to throw people off a bit and ask what the underlying footage supports. Some shots can be held longer. Some can be held shorter. For each shot, ask yourself if it is too long or too short.
The intro is 30 seconds and leads with 7-second clips. The first one ends with a fade-to-black which then produces a pseudo-flash-frame when you cut to the next shot. If I were to hazard a guess, there's a fade in the original material which you have to deal with, somehow. You have a bass-line from about 4 seconds to use if you want to break up these long introductory shots. At around 15s, you also have a beat to start utilizing.
It's a standard 4/4 beat, but you typically cut on 1 and 3. You can get a lot of flow by cutting on 2 and 4 too where the clap is sitting.
It takes some time for the brain to adapt to an entirely new image, so if you flick through images very quickly, like in some of the sections, you want to line up the images such that the main content is in the same spot. This makes it easier for the brain to decode.
Another nitpick from a bit of sound-work:
- Screenshot 2024-02-12 153959.png (17.19 KiB) Viewed 7243 times
Here are two cuts from one of the sections. The cut to the left comes late on the beat, and the cut to the right comes early. You typically want to prefer the cut to the right. Visual processing in humans is slower than auditory processing, so offset the eyes from the ears by a frame or two, leading with visuals. If you do this, the flow of the cut is going to be much nicer. If you have an initial cut straight on the beat, try nudging the music track one frame later and watch it.
Now, about pacing within:
StasyQ clips are typically shot at a higher framerate, then slowed down. This makes any shot look slow and dreamy, which suggests you want to dwell on the shot for a while to take it all in. Fast cuts alleviates this a bit, but if the content is slow, fast cuts won't make the footage feel any faster. You can contemplate speeding up a shot to the original rate, or find another clip where the action moves at a faster pace. The first 30 seconds of
Bored is a buildup in music, and you set up a slow pace. Then at 30s, where the beat hits, you might want to think about creating some contrast in the action within each shot. As an example, you could toy with having a couple of clips at one pace, then make a change when the talent tosses her hair such that it proceeds in slow-motion. At 60s, another music change suggests you might want to set up a pace change in addition to the rhythmic changes.
The music is around 129 BPM, or somewhere in that vicinity (didn't do a stellar job at ranging the beat). For something with a lower BPM, you can probably get away with a slower pace, but for this one, you might want to pick clips with more movement and action (i.e., retime the clip so it runs faster).
In the end, there's nothing right or wrong here. It's about what kind of emotion you want to evoke with your edit. Slower clips evokes one emotion. Faster clips another. Music provides a ton of feeling for a given project, and you can drive a lot of the change in feeling via music. The important thing is that one is aware of what is happening as you use one clip over the other, so you can get the right feeling. Namely the feeling you intended. There's certainly a place for slower paced content as well.
Make something you enjoy watching, and be ruthless with critique:
- Some critique you agree with. Implement it, preferably in a next project.
- Some critique is mostly technical and objective. This should be considered.
- Some critique is about "taste." Be careful if it impedes too much on your creative vision. Be open to new ideas, but don't adapt something if it alters the fundamental root of the project.
- "I don't like your clip selection" is taste. Don't compromise here. If you are into something specific (BBWs, nylons, ...), you have judgmental power when you are selecting amongst those clips. You know when a clip is good, because it evokes the right emotion in you. But the flip side is that when you are trying to use clips to appease the masses, chances are you don't have the same intuition about clip selection.
- Some critique needs to cook for a while, before you can make a decision. Try making a different edit of a section and let it stir for a while. Then come back to it. You might have a different opinion at this point.
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