Long Songs, Friend or Foe?

[eunice]

Once upon a time ago, I was convinced that long songs (4 minutes and over) could not make good vids. In part because at the time most of the longer vids I'd seen really didn't work for me, and partly because I couldn't imagine how to fill such a long timeline on my own vids without resorting to pointless filler.

That view has changed for me a lot over the years. I've since seen many a long vid that I loved (the ultimate example being sweetestdrain's ten minute Land, which is just an epic achievment of amazing on multiple levels). And tackled several 4-5 minute songs myself and found there was actually a lot I enjoyed about working with the longer format.

But I do think dealing successfully with a long song is different both in editing and music choices than with shorter songs. I'd love to hear people's opinions about what makes them work for you and what doesn't, both as vidder and viewer.

[legoline]

I think the longest fanvid I've ever seen may be "Thistle & Weeds" by sisabet and that one is barely 5 minutes long ... So, I can't really say too much on the subject.

I will say though that I've become increasingly obsessed with not vidding songs that extend past three and a half minutes. Anything above that makes me feel out of my depth, despite the fact that with 3 1/2 minute videos I usually end up going, "But I have all these clips left! Where shall I put them now?" in the end. ;D

[absolutedestiny]

BFF, imo.

[eunice]

I should have included the link referring to it, but Land: sweetestdrain.livejournal.com/243247.html

legoline - don't be scared of long songs! *points to link to TEN MINUTE vid of amazing*

I think a lot of the 3 1/2 minute range that most vids settle in at (and most of mine too) is that longer songs work differently in structure and so have to be approached differently in determining if they will make a good vid, and in the editing choices. So when we try to tackle them the same way as a shorter song, it falls down and reinforces the 3 1/2 minute rule.

I am thinking that structure is really the key. A longer song really has to change or build over it's course to work, maybe? Like a contemplative song with bursts of energy in it. Or, like, Thistle and Weeds has a steady, inevitable build to a climax.

Five minutes of consistently paced high energy is gonna get exhausting. Five minutes of slow contemplation that stays on the same keel is gonna get boring.

[obsessive24]

I usually have a self-imposed 4:30 min rule. I'll break it on occasion, but only if it feels like I have no other choice. I think it was Bertrand Russell who said "things should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler". ;D And let's face it, web audiences' attention spans are short. I know this because I have the attention span of a goldfish myself. If I can make the vid shorter, I'd do it. But not at the expense of losing something that's fundamentally important. But then it's always a judgment call as to what's fundamentally important to the vid versus what's just vanity and my own sense of self-aggrandisement that I have to keep a certain bit in because I'm an artiste with an e and a beret.

For me, a longer vid needs a really strong narrative structure and I need to be able to follow the story and stay interested in the story. For shorter vids that's not so important for me. If a vid's only 2-3 mins long, I don't need a narrative to follow if the motion and musicality is dynamic enough and the flow is entertaining enough. But for me that's almost the same category as a comedy vid with one joke over and over again (like physical comedy, for example) - it's fun to watch, but it gets old fast if it doesn't seem to go anywhere. In order for me to keep interested past the 3-minute mark, there needs to be a structured arc for me to follow - character arc, plot arc, whatever, just a sense that the storytelling is plainly developing somewhere with a sense of purpose.

My longest vid to date is Pagan Poetry at a little over 5 minutes. I'm really proud of it because I really tried my hardest to switch off my musicality button in this one and really tried to keep clip lengths long and let the footage/story breathe. The scope of the story justifies the length, IMO. But again, own judgment call only.

[absolutedestiny]

To clarify, the pacing on long songs is vastly different to your standard 3-5 min song. Long songs are all about taking their time to get to a place and not really about repetition. Think of classic long songs such as Stairway to Heaven, Bohemian Rhapsody, Bat out of Hell, Shine on You Crazy Diamond and the like - repetition isn't a factor, instead they take the time they need to develop.

This is a superb thing for a vid. Imagine, instead of condensing everything that you want to say about a show or character into one or two verse, you could take the time to build up your feelings and thoughts. The payoff can be amazing. My classic go-to long vid is Only in Dreams by kwasek:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hZo3lQU06U

It's an excellent song for Cowboy Bebop, where the characters are living in a dreamlike limbo where there lives are waiting to catch up with them. It takes time to look at each character and parallel this idea that they've all been hiding from their destiny and in the amazing amazing bridge they realise and *run* to face it. Awesome stuff, very hard to do with short songs.

I've got a great long song on the back burner, I really should get around to vidding it.

[thatyourefuse]

I think it really depends on -- not how much you have to say, as such, but how elaborate what you have to say is, and how many facets of it you can find to examine. I wonder if there's a parallel to be drawn with the poetry/short story/novel divisions in writing? (Possibly even to the distinct blurriness around the boundaries...)

(I have a twelve-minute instrumental I've been eyeing up and even, since I started typing this, a vaaaaague idea what I could do with it, but I'd have to be very very damn certain that it would TAKE twelve minutes to say everything I had to say. I mean, that's not a vid, that's a short film...)

[astarte]

I have an astonishing number of vids well over four minutes, I'm definitely friends with longer vids. The first thing that popped into my mind reading this, was a comment from Xandra, when I vidded 'My Skin', her: 'This is epic.' Me proudly: 'I know, their love is.' Xandra: 'No, I actually mean the length, love. Five minutes is epic in vidding. Don't you want to cut the song?' Me: 'NOOOO!' So I think it boils down to the subjects (for me) as a viewer. There are many pairings that just have this kind of tangled history, that can fill any timeline easily and time flies by, when watching a five minute vid for them.

Looking through my master list, the ones close or over five minutes are Cordelia/Angel - My Skin, Willow/Xander - Broken, Cordelia/Spike - Haunted, Sydney Bristow - Walk the walk, Angel/Wesley - Nothing else matters(the longest with 6:28 min) and Buffy/Spike - Crucify. All of them are about pairings, I felt had a complex canon relationship over several seasons and for most of them I felt fanon infatuation, reading fics and seeking out every vid I could get my hands on. What makes them work for me as a vidder, is the certainty when opening a new project and laying the audio on the timeline, that I will fill this up with no problem at all. The bone-deep knowledge that at the end I have to cut scenes I wanted desperately to include.

What I really love about longer songs, is that I can put more detail in the build up, I don't have to rush over character arcs and instead can dive deeper into some issues. Touch upon them, move away and then come back to them. Like in 'Broken' there were sections that show Xander's struggle with other people, fucking things up and then coming back to Willow on the line, 'If I'm broken, would you still love me?' after showing his mistakes just felt very cathartic. And you can have the unreliable narrator with showing Willow at her worst and Xander not really getting it, instead just asking, 'If I let you down, would you still want me around?' and the answer being yes, yes, yes.

But I also think, they work best for an audience that is willing to take that journey. Fans of the pairing will get the most out of a five minute video, because they are already emotionally invested in the subject. I'm always a bit surprised, when they work for an audience that doesn't know the source or maybe I shouldn't be, because like other people have said, you can approach the narrative differently and more methodical.

[franzeska]

This is a great topic! Specious arguments about how a particular song length is inherently good or bad are one of my least favorite types of vidding meta.

For me, I think the cutoff is somewhere around 3 1/2 minutes too. Shorter than that, and the kind of structure that works for 1-2 minutes can be stretched. Longer, and I have to find a structure that needs that space. I'm struggling with this on a few different vids in progress right now, actually.

As a viewer, in addition to the narrative or structure choices in a vid, I also want to see a music choice that justifies the length. The standard advice about editing music is something like: "Does it really need those extra choruses?" That's assuming an awful lot about what kinds of music people are vidding... but it's often assuming correctly. If the song feels like it has padding at the end, the vid will too. There are plenty of songs with this structure that are 5-6 minutes.

Then there's Meat Loaf.

I may not care that Merlin would do anything for love (no, really, anything), but that song never descends into one of those repetitious filling up the minutes pop song endings. It's that long because Jim Steinman is a little too in love with the rock opera concept album. I won't say I was riveted by the vid, but I did watch the whole nine minutes, and it was about equally interesting to me the whole time. It looks like it worked really well for fans of the source. (I do have a quibble with the vid: What is the that that he won't do? But, in fairness, the official video never answers this either.)

[xitsmymindx]

I kinda think length is the last think to think of. If it works, great, if you start and find a lot of pointless filler, prolly not the best idea but keep it tucked away in a folder somewhere for a rainy day project. I don't think it's the length that is important but what you do with it. You could get someone who does a 10 minuite vid of awesome and someone else doing exactly the same song and fandom and only 4 mins of awesome. We all vid different so is kinda an individual thing. I am all for people challenging themselves but at the same time, everyone has strengths and weaknesses. Someone could do really really awesome at shorter vids but terrible longer and vice-versa. I personally hate doing longer but I know some people work better that way. I don't have a rule per say, just happens that I never see vids in my mind with longer songs. But really, quality not quantity ^^

[absolutedestiny]

franzeska in the song, each verse has two things he will do and one thing he wont. The I won't do that of the chorus is a re-emphasis of the things he says he will "never do" in the verses. fyi

[thedothatgirl]

I really don't have a problem with making long vids or generally watching them. I've always just tried to please myself when it comes to vidding so those I make are as long as I want them to be. Anyhow a two minute vidlet can feel like eternity and a 6 minute epic vid can flash by and leave you begging for more.

I've made two that I would consider long. 6.50 minutes for an episodic vid using a classical piece which I could only successfully shorten by about a minute. That was in my early days of vidding, just to see if I could.

After that comes my Serenity vid - Signal to Noise www.thedothatgirl.livejournal.com/99257.html at 5.50minutes using a Peter Gabriel song that originally ran to 7.34 minutes. This is one of my own favourites, so I'm happy with how it turned out. After that I have at least twelve more that are 4.00mins and over.

[dragonchic]

I'm one of those people that likes to keep things around 3:30, half out of laziness, I think. But that's a good point that long songs are structured in a way that they take their time to develop and build rather than use the standard verse-chorus repetition. In that sense I think they could be really interesting to vid, particularly if you have a narrative that merits that kind of intricate build-up or slow burn. The length risks losing people but I think if done well the payoff for people that stick through it would be quite high.

[winterjasmine]

Dec 1, 2011 3:18:55 GMT -5 absolutedestiny said:

franzeska in the song, each verse has two things he will do and one thing he wont. The I won't do that of the chorus is a re-emphasis of the things he says he will "never do" in the verses. fyi

When I was a kid, my sister tried to convince me that the 'that' was that he wouldn't cut his finger nails... or was it is hair... something like that... heh

And to keep this post on topic having not mastered the ability to edit a song yet, my vids are as long as the song is... hehe...

Jaz

[franzeska]

Dec 1, 2011 15:29:29 GMT -5 winterjasmine said:

Dec 1, 2011 3:18:55 GMT -5 absolutedestiny said:

franzeska in the song, each verse has two things he will do and one thing he wont. The I won't do that of the chorus is a re-emphasis of the things he says he will "never do" in the verses. fyi

When I was a kid, my sister tried to convince me that the 'that' was that he wouldn't cut his finger nails... or was it is hair... something like that... heh

And to keep this post on topic having not mastered the ability to edit a song yet, my vids are as long as the song is... hehe...

Heh. Yes, ok, the song does sort of explain what the 'that' is, but I still feel like neither the official video nor the Merlin vid use that very effectively. (Some of the lyrics make more sense, but then there are things like: "But I'll never do it better than I do it with you." How is that something he's refusing to do? It makes the lyrics feel ambiguous to me. So I felt like the Merlin vid was half implying that Merlin wouldn't... I don't know... give up magic or side with Uther or something, but it never went quite far enough in that direction.)

But, more relevantly, I thought editing songs was scary until I tried it. It turned out to be a lot easier than I'd imagined for the most standard type of edit where you either remove the last few repetitions of the chorus or the entire bridge and most of what follows it. I like playing with Audacity now, but editing in iMovie was more than sufficient for that type of chopping off the ending edit or joining two pieces together. (I have a song I'm working on a vid to where I had to shorten a musical bridge, but the whole thing builds in a way where I had to edit it like cutting all of the B's out of ABABABAB. Audacity is perfect for that.)

I mean, no pressure, but if you are interested in editing songs some time, you're probably better at it than you think.