lizardjay

"Rules": Focus on Color/Color Grading. Make a one minute video where you let color guide the logic and flow, either by selection or special effects. Highly recommended: download an LUT or more and try using it! Advanced: Lightbuilding. Produce a one minute vid where your guiding logic is lightbuilding. Try letting the flow and build of light guide your editing choices throughout.

This is nominally a Naruto AMV but it's exclusively nature shots (and one kitchen) so honestly it's more of a peaceful landscape slideshow :D

Watch on YouTube

Notes:

I've never used an LUT and I wasn't feeling adventurous, so I just used the regular color editing effects in Vegas. I mostly used this to very gently tweak a few shots to be darker/less saturated, and to animate some subtle color shifts. I also threw the Soft Contrast effect (which basically ups the contrast and diffuses stuff a bit) at a low level over the entire video. Normally I use Soft Contrast for flashbacks, but it really makes rays of light beautiful.
To speak directly to the theme, I thought of this video in four segments: storm, partial light, full light, and sunset to night. This is mostly because I didn't have any good dawn shots so I couldn't do a full day, but I do like the stormy section. So I guess I mainly went with the lightbuilding aspect of the challenge, going from dark to bright to dark again. Everything was naturally in the same color palette also because it's all plants and water.
The most challenging part of this video was actually working with footage with different frame rates, which has never presented a problem for me before but for some reason it was NOT working. There's a lot of slow smooth pans in this video which makes any stuttering VERY obvious, I had to scrap a lot :(
At ~0:15, the video wiggles a bit but it's only on the Youtube version; when I open the video in VLC it's totally fine. I have no idea why this happened. It's also possible that VLC is lying to me? I've done enough technical stuff today that I called it a day and posted anyway.
This video is very peaceful but since I know that probably a third of these clips come from death-related scenes, it's a little sad to me. I'm curious to know how it comes across to people without any context!
Focusing on colors like this reminded me of an early childhood book, titled The Land of Colors. Apparently it was originally Italian? It's one of those cardboard books for really young children. Each page is a different main color and one object is a contrasting color; the next page is that contrasting color, with one object in another color, and so on. Anyway, here is the last page. The blue-black and white remind me of the last shot of this AMV a lot.