After days of waiting, I finally got an opinion back in trade on my latest video, UnHuman. Fellow AMV creator Zarxrax writes,
This video gets off to a good start, some good editing there. You have some pretty good action sync throughout the video.
Well, we’re off to a good start there, aren’t we?
But wait, there’s more.
When you start cutting back and forth between shots of buildings and stuff at 0:35, the video starts to go downhill. The actual editing here is fine, but the content gets old too fast. Who wants to look at 30 seconds of cutting back and forth betweeen a few buildings? It would have been ok to do this for a few seconds, but I think you just hung onto it for too long. At the least, I believe you could have thrown in at least a couple more different shots of different areas to liven it up a bit more.
It’s an artistic-taste thing, I suppose, but he’s probably right. That bit does go on a bit longer than perhaps it should. In my defense I point out that the music sort of dictates the length of that particular sequence.
Throughout the rest of the video, you seem to hang onto specific parts of the movie for too long. What I mean is, large chunks of the video seem to just be showing a section of the story from various points in the movie. If you were trying to tell a story with the video, this could be ok, but I don’t believe that was what you were doing. Mixing up scenes from all around the movie could have kept things a little more lively and interesting.
This is absolutely true, and is my greatest weakness as a creator right now. I get too tied to the original sequences. I need to break free of that curse in my next video. Absolutely.
This is a solid video with some good editing, but it just doesn’t seem to go anywhere. I’d recommend that you try to plan out exactly what you want to do with a video before you start making it (i need to follow my own advice here :p).
Here we touch on the bane of all AMV creators who aspire to greatness: Planning. Which is to say, planning out more than just the opening bit and one or two “cool bits” is the core of almost all really great videos. The next video must be planned.
Yeah, right. I’m the guy who’s never finished a story or essay outline in his life. But dammit, I must do better next time.
And this, folks, is why I really wanted peer feedback. It’s one thing to “think” you know what’s wrong with your work, it’s something else to have someone point it out to you in detail. This is a good thing when you’re still learning your craft.
