Multi-fandom movie vid: Acceptable in the Eighties by Calvin Harris

[boomqueen]

Title: Acceptable in the Eighties
Song by Calvin Harris
Fandom: multi-fandom Eighties movies including The Babysitter's Club, Better Off Dead, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, The Breakfast Club, Can't Buy Me Love, Desperately Seeking Susan, Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead, Fast Times as Ridgemont High, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Flashdance, Footloose, Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, Ghostbusters, Heathers, Mannequin, One Crazy Summer, Pretty in Pink, St. Elmo's Fire, Sixteen Candles, Some Kind of Wonderful, Splash, Teen Witch, Teen Wolf, Teen Wolf Too, Weird Science, and Who's That Girl.
Rating/Warning: PG/PG-13, but there are a LOT of bad clothing decisions...
Watch: Download and stream behind the cut (3:46 minutes, 33 MB).

Summary: The question isn't 'what are we going to do today?' The question is 'what AREN'T we going to do today?', or A Day In The Life of an Eighties Teen/Twentysomething


Download the .mov file (33 MB)
Stream at imeem or youtube

Credit and thanks: Many thanks to my fabulous betas: Mr. BQ, sundancekid, canadiangirl_86 and nebakanezer. Vidder's notes here. Leg warmer image is from fashion4all. Cross-posted to vidding, multividious, and fan_vids.

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Comments

[thingswithwings.livejournal.com]

this is fun! I've been saying that there aren't enough vids that hit that eighties-kink, so I was really glad to see your post. I love the opening getting-ready sequence (Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead! An eighties classic!) and you put together a lot of the great eighties teen movie conventions with hilarious and wonderful results.

But, a little concrit: I was really distracted by the aspect ratio problems that you had here - looks like you vidded in 16:9, but didn't crop or reframe the sources that were 4:3 or 2:35:1 so that they'd conform to that aspect ratio. You should read up on that - it took me forever to learn, but I'm really glad I did.

[boom-queen.livejournal.com]

I have a huge eighties-kink too, so YES! I definitely think there should be more eighties videos out there. I'm so glad you enjoyed the sequencing too. I had a lot of fun combing through the source for the funny/embarrassing common elements of 80s teen movies.

Thank you for identifying my aspect ratio problem! I could tell that they weren't all the same but this is the first time I've vidded from more than one source so I didn't know how to fix that. Do you have any recommended links/tutorials for how to recognize aspect ratio and adjust accordingly?

Thanks again for taking the time to watch and comment! Much appreciated :)

[thingswithwings.livejournal.com]

Yay eighties-kink! :)

Oh man, vidding from different aspect-ratio sources is SUCH a pain in the ass. The resource that I found most helpful on this subject was the mac vidding tutorial at foolishpassion.org (http://www.foolishpassion.org/) (but she has a PC tutorial too, if that's your style). She focuses on aspect ratio, with helpful diagrams and numbers and so forth.

Oh, and assuming that you do vid on a mac (I assume so because your vid is in .mov format), I've gotten a lot of help on this subject from the people at mac_vidding_101, which is a great community, and has tags on aspect ratio. I'm still a pretty new vidder, and I suspect that there are more advanced ways of dealing with the problem of multiple aspect-ratio sources (cropping or reframing them in Final Cut, for example), but my solution for the moment is to just crop everything into 16:9 (using MPEG Streamclip) and then vid in that aspect ratio (so I cut the tops and bottoms off of 4:3 sources like ST:TOS or Buffy, and I cut the sides off of 2:35:1 (film) sources like X-Men or Tipping the Velvet, and then 16:9 sources like Lost or SGA are left alone).

I hope that helps! Again, it's a superfun vid.

[boom-queen.livejournal.com]

Oh, awesome! I've used parts of that tutorial for other vidding tech, but I didn't realize there was an aspect ratio part too. Sweet, now I will be able to remaster this one after I finish my Sweet Charity vids :) Thanks so much!