bironic: Neil Perry gazing out a window at night (Default)
[personal profile] bironic
What's that? Tentacles and morbid humor? Count me in.

It Came from Beneath the Sea is a classic B-movie about an oceanic creature that starts encroaching on human ships/submarines/beaches/cities because radiation. It features the special effects of legend Ray Harryhausen. There are a bunch of human scientists and military types, but whatever, we know who the real protagonist is. I was pleased to be compared to [personal profile] jetpack_monkey when someone guessed that he made this vid. :)


Title: Part of That World
Fandom: It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955)
Characters: Giant octopus, civilians
Music: from Disney's "The Little Mermaid"
Length: 2:34
Content notes: Sea monster attacks treated humorously
Physical notes: Stop-motion animation
A/N: A treat for [personal profile] gwenfrankenstien for Festivids 2018-9.

Summary: Out of the sea
Wish I could be
Part of that world



AO3 | Vimeo | Download & captions pending





Lyrics here.



"Wouldn't it be funny to set the story to Ariel's song from The Little Mermaid and take the sea monster's POV?" I asked while perusing people's Festivids source requests, because if "They Want More," "Behind Blue Eyes" and "It's Always Halloween in the Pegasus Galaxy" didn't clue you in, this is the type of narrative subversion I enjoy.

Little did I know the journey this concept would send me on, because the footage was among the top three most annoying I've ever worked with.

There's the original version of the film and a colorized one. All the DVDs I could find included both, with an option to click a button and switch between the two versions as you watched.

I assumed this meant the DVD index would contain the full black and white movie and the full colorized movie, and I would just keep the black and white one.

INSTEAD, the footage consisted of 30 frames in color followed by the same 30 frames in black and white, then the next 30 frames in color and those 30 frames in black and white. For the entire film.

WHO DOES THAT.

I was not going to disentangle them manually. Surely some code solution existed for VirtualDub or AviSynth,* I thought, and although I couldn't ask fellow vidders because secret Festivids reasons, I found an answer on forums and Wikipedia: a command that would delete X # of frames every Y # of frames starting from frame Z.** So I set it up and ran it, and with some fiddling, it worked... until it went out of sync.

Because the movie is only 30 frames + 30 frames SOMETIMES. Sometimes it's more. Sometimes it's less.

WHY.

Fine. Fine fine fine. So I scrubbed through the footage in VirtualDub until it hit the sync issue and exported from the beginning until that point (a few minutes into the movie). Then I calculated the new starting frame, reset the AviSynth code, and scrubbed again from there until the next place it went out of sync and exported those few minutes. Except it soon became clear that this was going to take hours. To add insult to injury, when I watched the output file, the frame rate had gone wonky, so everything looked like it was in jerky fast-forward.

I gave up, found a crappy stream online, figured out how to download it, and edited that.

(There were a couple of times in the editing process where I thought the vid wouldn't cohere or be funny, but there was no way I wasn't going to try after all that prep.)

After I'd made the whole vid, the crappy quality continued to bother me, so only then did I go back to that DVD footage. I deleted all the special code and exported the relevant scenes, brought them into Premiere and deleted the color segments manually from each clip I needed. At least there was no wasted effort that way, because the lower-quality clips were already laid down and simply needed replacing one by one. (Well, that and a new sequence in 23.976 fps because the streaming version was 25.5.) Never mind that the final Premiere timeline looks like Frankenstein stitched it up.

In conclusion: tentacles. They're worth the effort.


* and I'm sure ffmpeg as well, but I haven't learned it yet

** For the record: SelectRangeEvery(60, 30, 885)
which means "take out 30 frames every 60 frames starting at frame 885"

Date: Feb. 2nd, 2019 06:29 pm (UTC)
purplefringe: Amelie (Default)
From: [personal profile] purplefringe
I CANNOT BELIEVE you found such an amazing way to combine your Tentacles vid with your Big Scary Monsters Singing About How They Want More vid! WHAT A NICHE.

Oh wait, yes I can. This is a HEARTBREAKING WORK OF STAGGERING GENIUS and I’m so happy you worked through all of that nonsense to make it.

Date: Apr. 24th, 2019 05:45 pm (UTC)
purplefringe: Amelie (Default)
From: [personal profile] purplefringe
.....soooooo.....can cosmic_llin and I put this in the Festivids show?? :D ??

ETA: at Vidukon that is!
Edited Date: Apr. 24th, 2019 05:45 pm (UTC)

Date: Apr. 30th, 2019 05:05 pm (UTC)
purplefringe: Amelie (Default)
From: [personal profile] purplefringe
\o/ is there a download around?

Date: Apr. 30th, 2019 08:07 pm (UTC)
purplefringe: Amelie (Default)
From: [personal profile] purplefringe
Alas no download button visible :( *tiny violins*

Date: May. 2nd, 2019 08:38 pm (UTC)
purplefringe: Amelie (Default)
From: [personal profile] purplefringe
Ahaha, that worked! Gracias! \o/

Date: Feb. 2nd, 2019 07:25 pm (UTC)
gingicat: deep purple lilacs, some buds, some open (Default)
From: [personal profile] gingicat
Totally worth the effort. I love it.

Date: Feb. 2nd, 2019 07:40 pm (UTC)
minoanmiss: A detail of the Ladies in Blue fresco (Default)
From: [personal profile] minoanmiss
My roommate Gingicat was just watching this in great delight. :D

Date: Feb. 2nd, 2019 08:01 pm (UTC)
isagel: Lex and Clark of Smalllville, a black and white manip of them naked and embracing, with the text 'Isagel'. (Default)
From: [personal profile] isagel
That is some heroic footage wrestling! Way to go for persevering!

Date: Feb. 2nd, 2019 08:11 pm (UTC)
thingswithwings: festivids! (yt - festivids! for the restavids!)
From: [personal profile] thingswithwings
oh my GOD I cannot believe that source! 30 frames colour/30 frames b&w, that is utterly ridiculous. You are a hero for going through all that and then REMASTERING YOUR OWN VID. And it was well worth it, because this vid is so beautiful and tender and hilarious. I can't believe no one knew it was you, despite what is now really becoming a pattern!

Date: Feb. 2nd, 2019 09:00 pm (UTC)
isozyme: iron man getting thrown through the air by an explosion (Default)
From: [personal profile] isozyme
This was amazing, had me in audible giggles! Poor sulky sea creature

Date: Feb. 2nd, 2019 09:20 pm (UTC)
seascribble: the view of boba fett's codpiece and smoking blaster from if you were on the ground (venommm)
From: [personal profile] seascribble
This is an incredible mashup but also a little bit TOO SAD. Poor tentacle monster.

Date: Feb. 2nd, 2019 10:29 pm (UTC)
toft: graphic design for the moon europa (Default)
From: [personal profile] toft
This is a heartbreaking work of staggering genius. You invested the tentacles with so much poignancy. I love it.

Date: Feb. 2nd, 2019 11:23 pm (UTC)
jetpack_monkey: (Sisko - Like a Boss)
From: [personal profile] jetpack_monkey
This was flippin' majestic.

Date: Feb. 5th, 2019 09:36 pm (UTC)
jetpack_monkey: (Default)
From: [personal profile] jetpack_monkey
I'm honored to have been guessed for it!

Date: Feb. 3rd, 2019 10:56 am (UTC)
ffutures: (Default)
From: [personal profile] ffutures
We are not worthy! That's an astonishing amount of work for something that length.

Weirdly, I referenced that film a while ago in a story set in the world of someone else's fanfic - I won't link because you need a lot of context and the original story is more than a million words, and the reference was about two lines of my story.

Date: Feb. 4th, 2019 04:51 am (UTC)
cuddyclothes: (Chase OMG)
From: [personal profile] cuddyclothes
THAT WAS AMAZING. Seriously. I'm sorry for the uninspired comment, but DAMN!

Date: Feb. 9th, 2019 04:03 am (UTC)
cinco: (mm: what in the gosh darn heck)
From: [personal profile] cinco
Oh my good lord, that is the most frustrating vid source issue I can even imagine--holy crap! But the results are wonderful and reading about the process is fascinating.

Date: Feb. 14th, 2019 05:08 am (UTC)
josette_arnauld: fancy lady looking for adventure (Default)
From: [personal profile] josette_arnauld
Wow! My favorite video from this year's Festivids, and it sounds like it was an epic to create!

Side note: are you going to post in on your Tumblr at some point? I want to share it on mine, but I don't want to link here if you're going to do your Tumblr - I'd rather give credit on the same platform if possible. (Does that make any sense?)

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