Dancers All Alone: An artistic montage of my favorite movie villains and antiheroes.

[Munchiselleh]

[IMG]http://i.imgur.com/iFFlG.jpg[/IMG]

So I spent the last week and a half or so slaving over Sony Vegas, trying to bring an idea into fruition that has been brewing in my mind for a while now, but was never attempted up until now. I made a montage featuring my favorite villains and antiheroes of cinema, paired with the music of...Lykke Li. I think it's a pretty atypical soundtrack, but I also think that I made it work in a cool way. So check it out! Constructive criticism, comments, etc. appreciated!

[video=youtube;tgDDjpWy69U]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgDDjpWy69U&hd=1[/video]

You should read this after watching, but here's the list of characters, in order of appearance:

Colonel Nicholson, The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
The Jew Hunter, Inglourious Basterds (2009)
Alex DeLarge, A Clockwork Orange (1971)
George Eastman, A Place in the Sun (1951)
Daniel Plainview, There Will Be Blood (2007)
Mr. Blonde, Reservoir Dogs (1992)
Bonnie & Clyde, Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
Vidal, Pan's Labyrinth (2006)
Harry Powell, The Night of the Hunter (1955)
Robert Ford, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)
Frank, Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)
Adolf Hitler, Der Untergang (2004)
Arthur Jensen, Network (1976)
Marv, Sin City (2005)
Hamlet, Hamlet (1996)
Frank, Blue Velvet (1986)
Roy Batty, Blade Runner (1982)
Don Lope de Aguirre, Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972)
Nurse Ratched, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)
Macbeth, The Tragedy of Macbeth (1971)

[Yurek]

Great list of films there.

[MaroonMak]

The song choice is...odd, but that doesn't mean it was bad. Great choice of villains even though I could not recognize a few. Overall, it was an entertaining video. Well done!

[Munchiselleh]

[QUOTE=darius_bielecki;36712562]Great list of films there.[/QUOTE]

thanks

[editline]12th July 2012[/editline]

[QUOTE=MaroonMak;36720268]The song choice is...odd, but that doesn't mean it was bad. Great choice of villains even though I could not recognize a few. Overall, it was an entertaining video. Well done![/QUOTE]

I know it was odd, that was pretty much the point. The song has an underlying melancholic feel with a bit of eerie thrown in, and I felt like using villains and antiheroes to both gel with and juxtapose the lyrics and tone. I was tired of seeing villainy paired with brooding soundtracks that over-accentuate evil and under-represent the humanity in villains.

I synced beats and lyrics occasionally, but neither are consistent all the way through. For the most part I edited it as if it were a film, meaning most of the cuts were organic and visually derived, given that most of it didn't have dialogue. I thematically composed a lot of it (like the Network monologue playing over Hitler or recurring TWBB and Jesse James) as well.

You should see the movies that have villains you weren't familiar with, I guarantee you'd like them.

[Dr. Fishtastic]

tbh I dont like the choice of batty, hes not a villain, hes more of a tragic antihero

but still kinda good overall

[Munchiselleh]

[QUOTE=Dr. Fishtastic;36732797]tbh I dont like the choice of batty, hes not a villain, hes more of a tragic antihero

but still kinda good overall[/QUOTE]

Did you even read the title? It says villains and antiheroes. If you didn't realize that, why didn't you complain about Macbeth, or Hamlet, or Nicholson, or Marv, or Robert Ford, or Daniel Plainview? And also, Roy Batty is definitely a villain. It would make sense for him to be in the montage regardless, but he's absolutely a villain. He was an anti-villain, but the villain of the story regardless. Decker plays the role of the archetypal antihero.

Could you maybe explain why it was kinda good, instead of great? I for one think I did something unique, and, as most art tends to be, it isn't universally appreciated. But if you have something constructive to say, I'd prefer that you say it, and not give me vague criticisms.

I think the biggest flaw of my montages is also one of its strengths. I use each clip very, very purposefully--each moment I show in the montage is supposed to have a certain impact based on the specific aspect of the character it's showing. The 5-second clip is supposed to point to a larger theme from the movie or character. If you haven't seen the film that the moment is borrowed from, it significantly decreases the impact or eliminates it entirely. And I used a lot of older (some more obscure than others) films that most people in our generation haven't seen.

For example, A Place in the Sun's clip had a segment from the beginning, where it zooms in on George's face and then shows the billboard (the zoom-in that I match cut with Alex DeLarge's infamous zoom out, which I reversed to zoom in). That was supposed to represent his inner tragic flaw: his greedy desires that overcome him. The billboard is the famous, "It's an Eastman!" billboard, and prefigures his rise to fortune and luck, only to have it taken away for trying to have all of the pie, and not just a slice of it. It was also a beautiful shot in terms of cinematography.

For another example to better demonstrate my point, Hitler's clips were supposed to show him as a semi-empathetic human, while at the same time showing his biggest flaws. He had a vision and a dream, but he could only accomplish it through treating people as pawns, and, when everything was drawing to a close, he still thought his dream was coming true. The first part was shown by his genuine interaction with a child soldier whose parents were murdered by angry mobs as a direct result of Hitler's actions. Hitler pinching the child's cheeks is a tender moment, but there's a lot of underlying brutality and menace behind it. The second quality was shown by him looking at his model construction of the future reich; I cut two scenes together to show disappointment and acceptance on his face (though it looks like one scene), despite the fact that there wasn't any in the scene itself. If I showed a half second more footage on either side of either clip, it would have had a radically different effect and revealed the moment to be something other than what I tried to make it seem. I also used the beginning of the Network monologue to audibly make my point about Hitler. That wasn't easy to do either. I think more effort went into this than you might assume.