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[Ark is watching]

Experimenting with distortion

[Cyan507]

Alright dude, looking forward to the series. You said you spent the last 6 months trying to get your editing up to speed, did you spend some of that time writing as well? Because I'm hoping to see a fresh series with good writing. Plus the more time you allocate to plot planning before you start the easier you can structure the show and put in hints throughout. But enough of my waffle, let's talk about your tests.

First one, seems fair, has a nice look to it. It more like damaged wmv. than VHS to me. To get a damaged VHS effect I would recommend using image scraping. That or use an actual VHS. Unless you're actually planning on using a VHS camera, avoid this, because nothing's more frustrating than having a narrator say they've filmed on tapes and then we get a mirror shot showing a camera that's smaller than any DV tape known to man. That's just me though. Wasn't fond of the audio seemed like a bit much. It didn't exactly match the visual distortion if that even makes sense.

Second one, loved the soundwork at 0:13. Sounded like the actual file was messed up, the tearing is fine, not easy to fuck up.

Third clip, damn that's a good camera...Model? Please tell me you're actually planning on using a sewing school cuz that sounds rad. The location is really nice, no complaints. I'm really picky about locations sorry. The distortion around 3:11 is good, suits the camera and the sound is good. 4:02 was great, fantastic timing, the beep was loud but I really liked it, it was subtle and I think that's crucial to doing glitchy effects in a series.

So all in all, I'd say you're almost there. If the last clip was your most recent work I'd say your heading the right direction. Bear in mind everything you show on camera will be analysed, dissected and criticised by your viewers so be careful. When filming don't look around with your eyes, look with the camera, unless you're blocking something will another actor off screen. Don't give too much screen time to subjects that aren't important to the plot. When walking try to keep the camera at a default eye-angle, so it's facing straight ahead and not slightly pointing down or up unless our attention is being drawn to said direction. I know I'm going on a bit but the camera work is so damn important in this genre I can't stress it enough, use it and manipulate it. The audience can see everything everything on camera, you can see everything else.

Are you working alone on this? Try to get as many reliable people to act or double as you can. My reason is people will either drop out, have stuff going on or won't be able to make all the filming dates.

I'm also interested in the software you're using, I'd highly recommend audacity as it's the holy grail for making distortion sounds.
I'd recommend visual programs if I knew your operating system.

Hope I helped!

EDIT: Try to move away from the white font on black background, I shouldn't have to explain why

[tloyc2012]

Looking good, so far, though yeah, white text on black background is cliché and probably would be seen as a Marble Hornets ripoff.
Even if it is the single simplest type of caption available in 95% of the non-Windows Movie Maker video editing software and people are extremely likely to use it at any given time.

[Ark is watching]

Thanks guys . Now to address your points.

Yeah by working on it I mean story wise as well as editing technique. I've made something that deviates a lot from the "Classic Slenderseries" but I'm hoping it's a good deviation.

1st: Yeah I see what you mean, I wasn't really planning to do much in the way of damaged VHS, I was just told that was the effect I had done with the distortion by someone in passing. The fact it looks like a corrupted .WMV works better, I also agree on the distortion, at that point I was just messing with effects and not really maying much attention to how much it'd go with the visuals.

2nd: Glad you liked it, I was worried when doing the tearing whether the cut points would be that smooth, whether they would variate that wildly and the like, but between the visual and the audio distortion, I feel I didn't do too badly when it comes to the effects.

3rd: Cheers on the Camera, It's a hitachi DZHV-597E Full HD Camcorder. I decided to invest as the camera was on offer at an exchange store. Only question I had was do I film in 720p at 60FPS or 1080p at 30FPS? I had plans to use that area (which was an actual sewing school) and permission from the owners to film all I like, however whether I use it as a sewing school is still up for debate at the moment. But I'm glad you liked the location anyway.

As for the distortion, I'm glad you thought they were suitable. Especially the landing glitch, I loved applying that one and I could honestly see it being useful in regards to "spacial rearranging". With the cabinet, I was kinda surprised with how well it worked and I'm glad it suited the camera.

Camera advice: I understand what you mean by that, I've kind of been trying to train myself to look with the camera when I go for walks at the moment to get myself in the mindset for filming. Looking back at the footage for most of the videos, I can see that's my flaw so far.

Actors: Currently I have three other actors and my biggest task at the moment is currently finding a tall man to play the Slenderman and a second thug, not to mention some hapless extras to be killed.

Software: I currently use a mix of Audacity for the audio distortion After Effects CS6 and Vegas Pro 12.0 (64-bit) for the visuals, with the codecs to rip the video audio direct to audacity and a data glitch plugin for after effects. If there's any other editing software I should invest in getting, let me know and I'll see what I can do. My OS is Windows 8.1 (86-bit).

White on black cliché titles: I completely agree with you, and at the moment I'm trying to find something that will work instead of the classic white on black text monologues. I contemplated having whoever was filming it narrate their thoughts at the end over some kind of passive background. But if you have any other ideas, let me know.

Regards,
Ark.

[Cyan507]

tobehonest, Ark, I'm not worried about you. You seem to want to take the time to carefully craft your series and make it the best it can be, rare trait in the verse.

I'm not going to go on too much but you have a good head and I don't see why your series wouldn't do well, each video you make surpasses the last so you'll be fine. I don't think your camerawork is "a flaw" I just wanted to make that point in advance so you'll have consistent camerawork from the get go.

There are ways around getting a tall man to play him. Whether of not you want to do this is up to you.

You're fine for software dude, audacity has you covered for sound and After effects has done me great in the last few months. If possible look into Adobe Premiere, it's similar to After Effects but it's a bit bigger. Marble Hornets and TribeTwelve are edited on that program. I was wondering about your OS because I use Apple for my editing and I mainly use Final Cut for chopping and soundwork than bring it into adobe for effects and such.

That's a good idea for the narrative, I'd roll with it.

[awakeasaurusrex]

I like the idea of having the protagonist just straight up talk to the viewer rather than doing the text-on-background deal - provided you have a good actor playing the protagonist, it would really help with establishing how they're responding to all this. (I always found the white-on-black text in Marble Hornets felt a bit emotionally distant - but it worked for MH because Jay seemed to be emotionally subdued a lot of the time.)

Some things to consider about that:

Placement of the narration. Putting it before a video to help put it in context ("Hey guys, so as some of you suggested I decided it was time to check out the sewing school...") as well as setting the viewers' expectations for what they are about to see ("What you're about to see is kind of fucked up, so brace yourselves") and giving any trigger warnings you feel are appropriate ("There's a lot of blood involved so if you're squeamish about that you might want to skip this one") At the same time, you may need to walk a fine line with it; on the one hand you'll want to avoid spoilering what the viewer is about to see, but on the other hand you don't want the narrator to be all mysterious to a pointless extent. (A useful phrase to fall back on might be something along the lines of "I've got a lot of thoughts about what went down here but I want to give you a chance to watch the video and make your own mind up about it first.")

Having narration at the end of the video might on the one hand be logical - it would often make sense for the narrator to give some sort of rundown of what their interpretation of the video is, or what happened after they stopped filming if filming stopped abruptly. It'd also be a good opportunity to sow the seeds of the next video ("I'm thinking about going back there at night to see if I can film the lights that the groundskeeper mentioned"). At the same time, you don't want the impact of a really shocking conclusion to a video to be blunted by immediately cutting to your narrator chatting away safe at home, so for some videos you might not want to have any narration at the end but instead have the narrator put up the "post-match analysis" video separately a little bit after the main video is uploaded. (You could even have them mention they are doing that in the start-of-video narration in order to build anticipation by having them say something like "Something big just happened and I wanted to show you this as soon as possible; I'm still thinking over what it actually means so I'll post my thoughts about it in a couple of days, but take a look and see what you make of it.")

What might be really neat if the narrator occasionally response to comments submitted by viewers via YouTube or Twitter, where the comments in question are particularly insightful (or are wrong, but wrong in a way which it would make sense and help the story for the narrator to look into as a working theory). That would help make the story a bit more interactive and make it feel more like a real person sharing their problems with YouTube rather than someone posting videos and then ignoring all responses to them.

What's going on in-story. If the protagonist is meant to be uploading something in a hurry, this had better be reflected in whatever narration they're adding to the video - or indeed they might skip the narration and just say "Can't talk about this right now but needed to get it uploaded quickly" in the "about" box or something.

[Cyan507]

[The7kproductions]

Hey guy's I am in a similar position to Ark is watching, I have been planning out a series for nearly a year now and have been meaning to get it started up and have started experimenting with "Distortion" since the beginning of this year and would like some feedback.

Before I give out links let me give some background information first:

1.These of tests are also a parody series in it of it's self so the video's are supposed to be very stupid. The "plot" is suposed to have gaping obvious plot holes.

2.I am not really going for realistic distortion, I am really just seeing how much I can do, these are supposed to just be something cool with a glitch/spooky aestetic ... in a couple of cases its is supposed to be intentionally over the top (because this is a parody of slender serieses)

okay so here we go:


Proof that Paco is evil: http://youtu.be/H4dgQdGBKkg This was me getting a grasp of the program and it shows.

Proof that Jars are evil: http://youtu.be/SPMSdU9ILuo I cleaned it up a bit here

Proof the Jackets are evil: http://youtu.be/AX4g0ie-tnY The first one I feel proud of ... but only because this the first REALLY stupid on ... I did not really ad any thing.

Evil Origins: http://youtu.be/iwmcrLr6sR4 I am proud of the way this one came out ... to bad I had to compress it so much ... you can't really make out alot of detail in this one which is bad because it has a couple of easter eggs in it.

Dot Dot Dot: http://youtu.be/Vgy5Tblaobs pretty subtle until the end.

Proof that Homsar is evil: http://youtu.be/pJMnPxQJbcM the latest one ... probably has the best effects and I learned how to compres better so it dosen't completely look like shit


I would most prefer comments to the latest one because that's most relevant but ... now you can see my progression.Thank you for the feed back.