My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic - Page 350

I used Sony Vegas 10, and some minor fiddling in a graphics editing program for the mirror stuff.

I literally copied the mouth/jaw shapes I wanted from other frames and pasted them over the existing frames. Takes forever, but it's the only way I could get those sustained notes to look good without freezing the video, which looks really obvious.

All this was done in Sony Vegas Pro 10, so the rotoscoping was all done by hand.

On December 12 2011 09:17 motbob wrote:
So. I've bitched more than once in IRC about the quality of fan-made MLP content. I guess I have stupidly high standards. I've talked about how I think all fanfics are bad by default, about how MLP techno songs that everyone likes are usually bad and derivative in my opinion, and about how I didn't see anything special about PMVs that everyone else liked. In fact, when watching some PMVs I would get annoyed because they'd have good ideas and some sort of artistic vision behind them but at the last minute they would lapse into videos of Music Set to Random Ponies, which is what most PMVs are. An example would be this "Fix You" PMV.

So, given that, I want to talk about the only good PMV in existence! Oh my god what a pretentious thing to say. It's still true.



The author of the video is "mmmandarinorange." I'll just call him/her "mandarin" from now on.

In this post I'm going to explain what makes the video so good. Why am I spending time on this? Mostly for the sake of future PMVers and anyone who wants to take time on a video editing project and not have it be completely shallow and bad.

1.) Design is King

When I talk about someone having an "artistic vision" for a video or other piece of creative work, that is just a more pretentious way of saying that the piece has been well-designed. When making any kind of video, people who know what they're doing go through an extensive creative process. That is, they plan out their videos in great detail before even booting up Sony Vegas Pro or whatever video editing program they're using. Most times this is done via storyboarding, though I don't know how Mandarin did it. Nukethestars is an example of someone who does really great creative stuff in his OSL hype videos, and he makes use of the process I'm talking about.

One thing that y'all should take away from this post is that making good videos is fucking hard! There were a lot of things that mandarin did in this particular video that were clearly the result of a lot of hard work.

Let's examine how the creative process might have helped make the Cosmic Love video good.

Obviously, PMVs wouldn't exist without a song. PMVs are based around the theme of the chosen song and usually sync up with the lyrics in some/many places. So song choice is a pretty important decision when making a PMV.

The song in question here is called "Cosmic love." It's a pretty dark song, which begs for a dark story/theme. However, choosing the right story/theme is critically important, too; you need to draw footage from the show in order to make your video and if there isn't enough footage that fits the story/theme then you can't do what you want to do.

For example: let's say I want to make a PMV on the song "Dog Days Are Over." Basically, the song is about a woman who's afraid of commitment. Great, I can make a PMV with the theme of Twilight's initial refusal to make friends. Some of the lyrics are "Happiness hit her like a bullet in the back," so maybe I can have half of the video be about her reluctance and transition the video into being about her acceptance. There's surely enough footage for that; if I need to, I can just fill the second half with random images of Twilight having a good time with her friends and it'll fit with the theme.

That's a really simple theme for a video, but mandarin's song/theme combination is really goddamn complicated and that's part of what it makes it so great.

Basically, there are two stories, loosely connected: the story of Twilight's magical freakout and the story of Twilight and co.'s efforts to free Luna from Nightmare Moon's influence. Both of these themes are pulled directly from canon but mandarin makes both concepts more emotionally impactful than they were in the show.

The chorus of the song goes like this:

"The stars, the moon, they have all been blown out
You left me in the dark
No dawn, no day, I'm always in this twilight
In the shadow of your heart"

The first time we hear the chorus it's simply an expression of how hurt/depressed/scared Twilight is during her "episode." The second time, the chorus drives the narrative. Nightmare Moon is on screen during "the moon" and the story is pretty tightly synced up with the lyrics. The third time, there are too many awesome things happening on-screen for us to really care about what the lyrics are saying (the lyrics have nothing to do with what's happening on-screen).

This illustrates the idea that the artist has a lot of license when deciding how tightly to fit the lyrics to the screen. Mandarin uses the lyrics as a way to create emotional moments, but doesn't enslave him/herself to what the lyrics are saying at any given time.

Even though PMVers don't have to follow the lyrics exactly, the tone of the song always needs to be followed, otherwise any kind of emotional resonance is lost. For example: 1:34 - 3:46 is the confrontation between Twilight and NM, but from 2:08 - 2:36 there's a sharp slowdown of the music. Any scenes of fighting during those 28 seconds would be completely out of place. As you can see from the video, mandarin comes up with a pretty genius solution to that problem. Nothing in the video ends up being out of place due to mandarin's brilliant design.



There are some other pretty creative things that mandarin does, including the idea of opening with the "falling star" of Rainbow Dash and transitioning into the crazy magic scene and somehow making it work with the lyrics. Things like that show a lot of forethought.

The moral of the story is: have your video planned out before you even boot up your video editing software. Have multiple drafts. It's hard to do multiple drafts when you've just spent forever video editing and you just want to get the finished product on Youtube. Measure twice, cut once.

2.) Technical stuff



So. What are some awesome technical tricks that mandarin pulled off in this video?

Creative transitions are one thing. I'm just gonna go through the video and list all of them.

0:00 -- the book intro
0:09 -- the "bar" transition with a piece of animation in the scene divider. Awesome.
0:15 -- Zoom-in on the eye.
0:27 -- the whole Mirrors thing. Used to great effect throughout.
1:10 -- doesn't waste any time, shifts narratives quickly and prettily
1:32 -- the bar thing again.
2:07 -- the "black explosion" is very cool and sets up the next scene really well
2:36 -- the flash of Nightmare's eyes before Twilight is thrown back from Luna is a nice touch.
2:50 -- subtle
4:10 -- book outro!

The lip syncing was done meticulously when it was needed, and loosely when it was not. You can check out 0:49 in the video and 18:35 of S01E01 to see an example of how a piece of animation is changed during lip syncing.

I've already talked about the problem of how 2:08 fits in with the rest of the video. Mandarin's solution was apparently to create an entirely new environment and have a rotoscoped (cut out from the background) Twilight walk around in it.

Badass.

Montage at 3:11. Every PMV needs a montage.

Finally, the dual screen after 3:45 are probably just there to fit in all of the "outro" scenes in a short amount of time. It works.

On December 12 2011 13:58 Eaglelander wrote:
PS:
A PMV that was well-done, if not relevant:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFXBrkbKVLI

On December 13 2011 00:57 Johnzee wrote:
A couple of months ago, I helped turn one of my new friends into a brony, and she's really... REALLY... into the show now. Fortunately she's a great artist and keeps making awesome stuff.

Yesterday we had a pre-Christmas TV-show marathon (we're watching Battlestar Galactica, The Wire, and of course, MLP) at her place and I got to see some of her more recent projects: