Horses are good company -- The Witcher

A few things I learned making my first fanvid!

1. It's ok if it takes literal years. It's good to go slow.

2. Ask people directly for help. Many people are happy to teach and help! You may have to find the right person and you may have to ask several times. It's so much easier to learn (for me) from a teacher versus reading text online. There are also You tube tutorials for the software I used.

3. Biggest obstacle for me: anxiety. I mean generally in life but also in just... opening the software and getting started. Chronic pain is also an obstacle for me; I coped with this by working in short bursts and letting myself take days off when I felt particularly sick, and by working in a comfortable setting. For instance I bought a stand fan to set up by the kitchen table so I'd be less hot.

4. Steps I went through:

A. Generating ideas, over years, usually by hearing a song and thinking "oh that's perfect". I have several ideas, some of which are complex, and some of which are simple. I decided to start with the simplest one, a cute vid about a cute horse, with no particular message except "I like this movie".

B. Slowly learning how to acquire source. I did this various ways, such as ripping DVDs, asking someone to teach me how to torrent, and buying music off of band camp.

C. I downloaded DaVinci Resolve, which has a free version, and is very good software. I believe the software has improved in the last few years, and therefore it is easier to make vids than it used to be.

D. I asked a friend (eruthros) for a lesson in getting started, and we used screen sharing on Zoom. Very handy.

E. Clipping. It's ok to make big messy clips as you can make them smaller later.

F. Putting clips on the time line. Making a title card for the end (I used YouTube tutorials to help with this). One thing I may do in the future is find a way to mark clips I've already used.

G. Finishing a draft and sending it off to beta.

H. Editing: More clipping, lots of moving things around, deleting clips, making them shorter or longer. I cut out all the night-time sections because they were too hard to see. I trimmed the edges to make them sharper. Timing is a challenge for me and an area where I expect to improve.

I. Making subtitles. I found this very frustrating because I have a hard time with the timing; next time I will make the subtitles first, and do so directly in DaVinci Resolve rather than manually in a text file. I found the lyrics for the song online.

J. Uploading the vid and the subtitles, and posting it. I have more to learn in this area; for instance I have no idea how to compress files.

Thanks to everyone who helped me and gave me feedback! I love my fannish community.