Glitter and Gold: Sound and Story

Glitter and Gold: Some Thoughts On The Use Of Soundwork in Vids.

Look, I’m old. How old? Old enough that the first vids I ever saw were appended to the back of homemade video tapes of The Sentinel. One time the episode finished but the tape kept rolling. Then the music started: and what the hell was this, this video? In hindsight it was a huge advantage to see vids this way. Though the vid footage was grainy, made from multiple-generation copies of episodes that had themselves been taped off the TV, those first three or four vids I saw had been curated for me by the person who had made the VHS tape: selected presumably because she liked them: and because they were about The Sentinel, a show that I was in the process of getting wildly fannish about.

When the music started – I can still to this day remember almost all the visual beats of Glo-Ro’s vids “I Think I Love You” and “It Had To Be You” — my heart soared with feels, plus I was alone in my living room and there was nobody to judge me.

I don’t remember how many times I watched the seven or eight Sentinel vids that were at the end of those tapes (and one of them, the Media Cannibals vid “What I Like About You,” was a multi-fandom tryptic featuring The Sentinel, Wiseguy, and Due South, so that vid remained emotionally relevant to me for years.) Relatively speaking, there were so few vids in nineties fandoms like The Sentinel, Due South, and Wiseguy that I still remain deeply attached to my favorites, almost primally bonded to them. It was like seeing home movies of people you loved. My boys! With the feels and the rhythm! A girl could embarrass herself. A vid could be stupidly, transcendentally transporting; three minutes of pictures and music that, when it came to pimping and to feeling were worth more than thousands and thousands of words.

Now, for better and for worse (mostly for better) we are spoiled for choice. A popular fandom — let alone the kind of juggernaut fandoms where I like to spend my time – might generate hundreds or even thousands of vids very quickly. In the old days, it took years to exhaust clip choice: it was 2000-2001 by the time Alex of the Media Cannibals made “It’s All Been Done” about Duncan/Methos vids from Highlander, a show that debuted in 1992. (Narrator’s voice: “In fact, it had not all been done.”) Nowadays, you’d get that many vids in a couple of months as fans around the world fire up their computers and feed in easily-available digital files.

an unbelievable explosion of creativity

As a result, we are seeing an unbelievable explosion of creativity in the vidding world. People of all ages and from around the world are vidding with more powerful tools and more available source than ever before. The tough part, in my opinion, is filtering – and, again speaking for myself, I feel like I nope out of a vid faster than I nope out of a story, because when a vid works for me, it’s visceral and deeply personal: a conflagration of taste, emotion, and rightness of interpretation that really affects me. I go very quickly to YES or DO NOT WANT; its either NOPE or riveted attention. Who was it? – Noel Coward, I’ve just looked it up – who talked about the incredible potency of cheap music? He was being snarky, but the truth, if we allow ourselves to tell the truth, is that a vid you love hits you in a place that’s not rational. Pop music can do that to us, and pop culture, too. The combination can make a girl cry in her car, or stop you in a kind of arrested bliss when you hear a certain song come on the radio.

a rawness that moves me

There are vids that, for me, encapsulate entire fandoms: Merry’s vid “Hello” was the vid that pulled me into Stargate Atlantis, as Poe became the seductive voice of the city (and the fandom) itself; Lim’s “This Is How It Works” still makes me cry when I hear Regina Spektor’s song, her staccato music cheerfully insisting that Rodney follow the numbers onward past despair. Lim’s amazing shot of John Sheppard looking straight into the camera evoking not so much his presence but his forevermore absence: Rodney’s terrible, terrible loss of him in Synecdochic’s SGA story “Freedom’s Just Another Word For Nothing Left To Lose”.

When an artwork can affect you like this, so profoundly, working its way past your grown-up defenses, it can make you oddly intolerant of work that doesn’t work for you. Candidly, sometimes I feel almost angry at vids I don’t like; I’m angry at it for having not pleased me. There’s a rawness to vidding that moves me beyond polite, distanced responses, or even a knee-jerk intellectual response. I can do it, but I don’t want to: I don’t want to clap politely, and I don’t want to feel critical and nitpicky. No, I want to feel joy or tears or laughter. I want the vid to grab me by the throat.

But I think our need to filter - both to deal with the enormous quantity of vids out there, and also to deal with our own susceptibility to feels and cheap music – result in our coming up with filtering systems that aren’t particularly defensible. We make rules even though we know full well that rules are made to be broken.

The history of vidding is littered with crazy rules: don’t use external footage, don’t use fancy cuts or special effects, don’t vid songs that have already been vidded, don’t use overvidded clips, don’t use clips where people are talking (“talky-face”), don’t vid songs where the lyrics aren’t clear (which, to be fair, could drive a person crazy in the years before you could just goddamned google the lyrics to scratch that itch.) Most of these rules are charmingly dodo-ish today, but there still remain biases in some camps: against YouTube, (which - !!) (NB: this is as ridiculous as the old fannish suspicion of “netfic”—that is, of fanfic on the Internet), against cuts which fade to black, against text on screen, and against soundwork.

It’s the last of these I want to focus on. For fans of a certain generation, “soundwork” in vids evokes only interpolated dialogue – often highly significant lines from canon – either in sync with the video footage or overlaid on top of it. This dialogue is sometimes used as an epigram, or a kind of mood setter: “What kind of a man is Sherlock Holmes?” “I’m with you to the end of the line.” “If the situation was reversed, and I was dying - you’d do same thing.” “I’m the monster parents tell their children about at night.” This doesn’t work for many people, myself included: the evocation of what might be the most meaningful lines of a story can, paradoxically, leave me cold; it feels like an unearned, emotional cheat. But this isn’t all of what soundwork is, and it doesn’t make soundwork a reasonable filter for making one’s way through vids. Vidders are doing increasingly complex and emotionally-moving things with their audio as the technology for doing so improves, which continues a general trend in vidding.

In the early days of vidding, of course, good soundwork really wasn’t possible at all. In the VHS era, songs were rarely even edited, and for every vidder who rose to the challenge of filling that extra musical time with building visual interest, there was one who ran out of ideas or pushed her viewer’s attention span beyond its limit. When vidding went digital, fans quickly seized on the opportunity to alter the music they used: cutting songs down, of course, but also changing their structure to enhance or adjust the vid’s meaning. But even in the relatively early days of digital vidding, many fans went beyond this to work really creatively with sound.

For example, in “Ecstatic Drum Trip,” (2005) Luminosity created her own audio track by rhythmically weaving relevant dialogue from Farscape into Rusted Root’s “Drum Trip” – in particular, she used the exchange between John Crichton and the ancient on the subject of time: “Time…flies. Time…heals. Time…Rosemary and Thyme. Time…s’up.” This new audio track is an important source of narrative and emotional meaning in the vid, which doesn’t simply document the vertigo of Crichton’s journey throughout the show but allows the viewer to experience it in her own body: to feel she is sharing Crichton’s experience.

Lim has also created and vidded her own audio tracks, creating music from scratch (as in 2006’s SGA vid “Mission Report,”) and also putting together audio collages. In “Poesis she mashes up themes from Person of Interest (“Mr. Reese,” “Listening with a Million Ears,”) with a variety of other sounds and effects, including a computerized female voice reading Diotima’s speech on immortality from Plato’s Symposium (“Love is of the immortal. The mortal nature seeks to be everlasting and immortal”) and the rapid-fire sound of fingers typing on a keyboard. The resulting soundscape – vidded against a collage of Machine-eye images and effects – suggests a Goddess-like perspective on humanity and poignant possibilities of connection and love.

Born-digital vidders, unsaddled with a history where you couldn’t adjust your audio, have never seen a reason not to: why not edit your audio while you’re editing your footage, since the software allows you to do both? The result can be sophisticated soundscapes that integrate audio elements of a show into the vid music, or, I might say, flipping it, that make a show truly musical. A vid like KatrinDepp’s “the game is something” (Sherlock, 2014) interpolates a series of sounds from the show—a tea-cup clattering into a saucer, a heel slamming into the ground, the plop-fizz of Alka Selzer into a glass – into the soundscape of Fatboy Slim’s “Funk Soul Brother.” The result makes you feel like the vidder is somehow making music with the show itself, using the characters’ own noises for instrumentation, the way a busker might drum on plastic buckets in the subway, or even that the show is singing and playing along, dancing and shimmying its shoulders. The Fatboy Slim track works particularly well for this, since the words dissolve into sound and then become words again as the song moves on: F-f-f-f-f-funk soul brother. So when the video editing gives us Mrs. Hudson hand-clapping and Sherlock waving his arms in the air, the show itself seems to be moving between straightforward televisual narrative and dance/musicality.

Glitter & Gold

musicality and rhythm in the service of story

I want to take as a case study Grable424’s Glitter & Gold , a vid made in collaboration with djcprod, not only because it’s in my current fandom and I love it, but because I think it’s a case of successful soundwork that also points the way to the future: soundscapes that layer sounds, effects, and new Foley work to create musicality and rhythm in the service of story.

The soundwork in “Glitter and Gold” is both subtle and powerful, and it’s meaningful and thematic throughout. “Glitter and Gold” is a vid that emphasizes the blood and guts humanity of our favorite Marvel superheroes, the effort and determination behind their superhuman performances. “I am flesh and I am bone,” the song begins, over the picture of our heroes, barechested and vulnerable, “rise up, ting ting, like glitter and gold.”

The song, by Barns Courtney, features percussion made by “hitting disused filing cabinets, old film cans, and stacking scissor snips,” but Grable and djcprod enhance this with 5:1 surround sound, adding to and filling out the song’s percussive beats in ways particularly relevant to the Marvel universe. The repeated “ting, ting” thus becomes overlaid with the metallic clang of Tony Stark’s blacksmithing, and we hear subtle noises of motion directing us to the flap of a leather coat, the clink of Iron Man’s armor, and the raising of Cap’s shield: these are tools and symbols both. There are also various subtle thwacks and thumps in the audio that establish that the bodies pictured have mass, velocity, heft. All this serves as an introduction of sorts, like the overture to a symphony where the musical themes are introduced. But at :11 Grable424 and djcprod open the vid proper, cuing their title sequence with an interpolated line of dialogue, which is, not unrelatedly, about sound: Loki wryly declaring, “I’m listening.”

We then get a series of percussive thumps, with an extra loud beat to mark the title cards. Boom: MARVEL. Boom – GLITTER AND GOLD. These percussive thumps march on to become the heavy footsteps of the next section: “Do you walk in the valley of kings?” The propulsive power-walks that follow – Steve, Tony, Fury, Loki, Wanda, Natasha – have real weight; every footfall sounds like Krakatoa. The video editing emphasizes the continuity of movement between the characters – e.g. Wanda begins a movement that Natasha finishes – but it’s the soundwork that emphasizes their physicality of the characters, reminding us of the opening lyric of flesh and bone; we are cued not to think of these superheroes as 2-D comic book cutouts but as real three-dimensional bodies. The sounds of human effort are layered into the music with perfect synchronicity, so that we hear grunting, the crunch of bone, the crack of gunshots – things that mark the collision of people and things in a way that makes the fighting feel real; we can feel it in our teeth.

we can feel it in our teeth

This physicality compliments the various conceit of the song’s lyrics. “Do you walk in the shadow of men/ Who sold their lives to a dream?” the song asks, showing us images of Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes: men who sold their lives to a dream if ever men did. “Do you ponder the manner of things/In the dark?” We see our superheroes experience doubt, fear, denial; emotions felt viscerally, in the body, and the audio track has already connected us to that body that feels. These characters grit their teeth and struggle onward; they may have fire in their souls (and we can hear the rushing roar of fire, low in the audio track), but the enhanced sound effects in this edit, combined with the skillful editing of the actors’ expression, makes us feel in our bones that this shit hurts. It’s the subtle sound that makes the experience feel real: the clicks of equipment working, the slice of metal cutting through the air, the crackle of electricity, the scrape of metal against concrete, the thump of a fist against glass – or hitting a face. The thud of a body falling to the ground.

“Glitter and Gold” climaxes in the bridge. Here the melody changes and we get a new lyric: “Cause everyone in the backroom’s spinning up / Don’t know what you’re asking for/ And everybody in the front room’s tripping out/ You left your bottle at the door.” That middle-eight concludes with what, in my opinion, are the most affecting eight beats of the vid; a series of desperate, breathy, perfectly-timed exhalations, one after the other, by Scott, Wanda, Cap, Natasha, Tony, Clint.

These breaths are intensely visceral, and create the feeling of momentary pause in the relentlessness of the assault, a dizzy, momentary gasp of air into needy, desperate lungs, and in fact these wordless, breathy vocalizations culminate in the spectacular visual and aural crash of Captain America’s shield against Iron Man’s repulsors; the high point of the battle. But the vidders have given us the experience of a deep breath taken by human creatures, a steeling and sucking for air before the madness of fighting resumes. It’s the audio, as much as or even more than the video, that gives is the feeling of metal, tested.

"a visual and auditory poetry."

Many vidders cite “song choice” as the definitive element of vidding. So sound has always been crucial: we let our ears tell us what we’re supposed to see. And yet we’re really only at the start of creating tailor-edited soundscapes that are as sophisticated as our video editing - sound now is where “effects” were a few years ago, when some people objected to visual effects on principle rather than asking whether they were skillfully or appropriately used. Years ago, Rachael Sabotini of the Media Cannibals defined vidding in a way that stuck with me: she said that vidding was “a visual and auditory poetry.” I think that some people hear that and think it means something highbrow or Norton Anthology-ish, but poetry in its most basic definition is words that are put together for their sound as well sense. Poetry is how we remembered things before we could write things down, poetry puts our collective ideas in the body by charging ideas with rhythm. Vidders have always used music to convey meaning, but I think that technology is now allowing us to expand what we can – and make other see - with our ears.