Alba | Comments about the edit

 First of all, the finished CV

I've been wanting to do a small project (either express CV or promo) for some time, and that idea finally materialized into "Alba". Alba is an express CV which I announced in October 15 2020 with a 3 (in reality, 4) day period for video submissions and a 1 day period for editing. I wanted to be distracted for a few days. It's been tense lately, and spinning pens has been a good escape from covid and real life.

What does "Alba" mean?

"Alba" means "dawn" in Spanish. The word for "dusk" ("ocaso") is also very pretty, and indeed the footage I used for the intro and promo video is from a sunset, but sunsets symbolize something finishing, while I wanted to give the video a more cheerful note.

Doki Doki Literature Club

I haven't played many games, but DDLC is one that I'm particularly fond of. I wanted to translate the same vibe to this CV, thus the glitched middle section in an otherwise bland and standard pen spinning video. I was very doubtful about being able to faithfully make what I had in mind, and it was the most challenging part since I'm not that used to working with Premiere, but I'm happy with the result.

Another idea that I had was recording a combo with a very long section of just the sunrise at the end, then using the sunrise part for the intro and when it glitches, instead of having the tag, rewinding the whole CV until getting to my combo (in reverse, obviously). I liked the idea for how meta it is, since that way the "first" player (ShakziiP) isn't the first, being the second, as a different combo was the first, just that it wasn't shown yet. I discarded this because my video wasn't very good quality and the tag allowed me to fit one more combo. Sad, I woke up very early to film that.

Also, I find hilarious that doing a mafibo somehow crashes the CV. Like, if the trick was illegal in some way. Using the mafibo combo for this bit was inspired by Drowsy's Twitter videos. The fact that it had a black bg came in handy, since it was the perfect still image to glitch and use as background. Couldn't have made it better if I tried.

Stoicism

Pixels was as surprised as myself to hear that the background song was made by Sakuzyo. Finding the right song for this idea has been the single most difficult part of the whole process, taking me the full three days of the video submission period. I considered other, more "standard" Sakuzyo songs and various future garage/Burial-like songs, among others. But the jazzy song with the freestyle in the middle fit the project like a glove.

Makeup to show true beauty

A resource that I never thought about using before but that gave this CV a cleaner look and a more consistent pace was using small speed remappings to hide light execution mistakes or sections with a rhythm different to the one of the song/video. About 1/4th of the videos of Alba are time remapped this way. This was a very nice makeup to the freestyles that I was sent.

Epilepsy concerns

If you didn't think about this, then I did my job correctly. After watching the first draft (relevant bit uploaded above), I remembered Coffeelucky commenting about harsh effects being a possible trigger for seizures or epilepsy. And rightfully so. To say the least, the glitch overlays were a bit annoying at 100% opacity.

Since I didn't want to throw away the whole segment, I researched a bit about seizures. Seems like the problem is harsh changes in contrast at 3 Hz or above (that is, 3 flashes/s or more). This checked both boxes. I found a software which can analyse videos to see how harmful they can be, but that seemed like too much work. What I ended up doing was lowering the opacity (and in turn, the saturation, as the background is black) of the first glitch overlay to 25% and the rest to 40%. This kept the glitchy impression, while being extremely mild the first time it happened. This means that in the rare occasion that someone with epilepsy is watching this video, the first glitch warns him to close it / look away. Since the glitches were only in a clearly differentiated part of the song, that gave a sound cue to look away too. I considered adding a warning at the beginning of the video, but after these changes the flashes were mild enough and sufficiently well indicated for me to think that it was safe to watch. Hopefully everyone agrees, as it is a serious concern of mine.

Speaking of the glitched section, my tag with xound was meant to be more confusing than anything else, thus why I didn't care much about the heavy effects and speed reversal. However, if someone really wants to watch the tag unedited and in normal speed, there you have it.

Filter and combos 

The filtering process was especially hard for me since there were too many combos on a similar level. From a total of 30 submissions and 17 slots (the 17th being made just to fit more people, as I already explained), 19-20 combos could have been reasonably included. The 2-3 combos of that group which were filtered were decided by how they didn't really sync with the song. It's always hard to leave nice combos out.

I won't comment on all 17 combos but let's say a few things.

Pixels - Starting the combo by capping the mx was amusing. That mod loves to fall apart.

Taka - His combo started by pressing a keyboard key. Was that a first try then? Is he human?

Mesi - It is awesome! The perfect last player combo.

Tigres - Weird to see him spin DC, but it's not bad. Area vibes. The angle was a bit wonky, which is why I told him if he could refilm, but he was busy.

Ikari Riota - I was so happy to receive a combo from him! Underappreciated style of pen spinning in 2020, but that made me even happier to have it in the collab. Showing that there's more to pen spinning than basic tw sonic jp motion and 122 finisher.

That's it! I'm very proud with the result, and I'm glad to see that other people liked it too. Best 💙