Long tracks

Ok so I really have no clue on where this should go so I put it here…don't worry I'll get the hang of it hopefully lol. So my question/am confused on is...short tracks. Why do so many people make short tracks. What's wrong with the long tracks? Like the 4-5 minute ones. Personally I love long tracks but people don't like them for some reason. I mean I'm just voicing my opinion at the moment and like I like the long tracks cause they take time to make and they can get pretty involved at times and its really cool what people can do and that's pretty much why I make the long tracks is because I don't want to stop it at 2 minutes plus my songs I listen to are 3-5 minutes long and they are pretty fantabulous on my point of view you know? Ya feel me home dawgs? Ya feel me? What's wrong with a 5 minute track or 4 minute track I mean I understand that it's a long time to be looking at a screen at a track but just looking at how much time and effort goes into it. I mean for me I can break out a 4 minute track in a week or actually a day if I work hard enough on it and it'll look pretty decent and then there are these extremely good tracks people work on for months. I mean your working on a single track for months and I'm not bashing on y'all at all I'm not being mean at all but if your going to take that long on a 2minute track why isn't it going to be 4 minutes or 3 minutes. I'm just like dang that's a long time to work on a track. Yeah I also have a job but I work short hours and only on weekends because of school. But I can pull off these long tracks pretty quickly and have decent looking graphics btw as I'm writing this I'm getting a slow understanding on why it takes so long but it's just why does it take so long for a 2 minute track why not make a track that's 4 minutes long and work the same amount of time on it and have still amazing graphics. I'm just confused on it because as I'm looking at others tracks they are good just they are really short. I mean go big or go home but yeah never mind. My question is why don't people like long tracks why do they choose to make short tracks? I know it's called a short but not that short lol.
Just my opinion.

It's about pure laziness, but sometimes motivation/inspiration loss also gets in the way of making a long track

i personally dont like tracks longer then 2-3 minutes unless it is rediculously good, I(and probably alot of other people) will start to get bored by the end of watching it, and when you get into the very complicated tricks that people do it takes much much longer then it would otherwise, so it could take a week just to get 10 seconds done on the track because its so intricate,

1) I'm usually syncing to a song
2) I lose inspiration after awhile
3) I don't want to wait too long to release a track
4) The biggest reason is that is that it gets incredibly annoying to have to rewatch your whole track every single time you want to work on it. Even if it is only 2 or 3 minutes long, it can get really boring to have to sit through that every time you need to play your track from the beginning again.

Yeah, once you get into more complex tricks, you'll start to feel the same way. It takes roughly forever and a half to make top quality long tracks (Jam was one of them, it took him two years to finish). So it's not that I have anything against long tracks, it's just so much easier to stick with the shorter ones.

^Opal's right.

The reason I don't make many tracks longer than a couple minutes is that it simply takes too long. Either I'll burn myself out on a particular style (i.e. heaven forbid, >3 minutes of XY) or I will have improved so much over the course of the track that the first 30 seconds or so will look terrible in comparison. Maybe it's a little perfectionistic for me, but I don't like releasing tracks that stay essentially constant for extended periods of time, style-wise.

Higher standards = shorter tracks.

Surprisingly, average track lengths were at their shortest in early 2009. 90% of tracks were <1 minute long fling quirks. 1:15-1:45 is a good length for today's tracks.

I (and a lot of people) are probably the opposite of what qwerty said - the first parts of my tracks are good and then I just end up getting rider's block and nothing I'm adding looks good.

Cereal wrote:I just end up getting rider's block and nothing I'm adding looks good.

Dat phrase. Ooohhhh yeeeeeaaaaah.

If I'm scening, I usually run out of ideas for drawing things in the style that I'm using after a while, and I'm too lazy to do something like breathtaking silence, so I just release it.

Allow me to rephrase what everyone else said in my own words:
4 - 5 minute long tracks to me get boring after the first 2 - 3 minutes. But that's really just personal preference. I try to make all of my tracks between 1:10 and 1:30 and even that is a challenge for me sometimes. The process gets tedious after a while and if you do plan on making a 4 - 5 minute track, prepare to spend anywhere from a couple of months to a couple of years building it (if you want it to be good/impressive.) And even so if you do decide to do that, you'll have gone all that time without releasing anything and people might not even watch the whole thing all the way through. It's much more beneficial to make tracks of a lesser length. Heck. My last track was only 0:40 seconds long.

Scenery tracks are a different story. They require heaps more work and creativity + the time it takes to make the actual track itself (unless you have one already ready to go.) That's pretty much why you don't see hardly any of them nowadays.

/obvious

Nobody makes long tracks because they can't be inspired for long enough.
Frankly, I think it's also because they, subconsciously or not, partly make tracks for the community. So if you plan on making a huge track, and when you're at two minutes, it's pretty easy to say "you know what, this track is of a good length now, the community will like it anyway, let's release it".
Making long tracks nowadays can only be done if you make tracks completely for yourself and not for the people around you.
.. And you need a strong computer and something to do while waiting for Bosh to run through the 4 minutes you've already made.

When making complex manuals and quirk. The time that is required to make a track multiples by a large margin. When I first started I could make a 1:00 track in just an hour, but now it takes a couple weeks. Simple flat-sledding takes no time at all and is for the most part lazier than real tricks. Time of a track is not as important as skill and execution.

Also, once you get into doing complex tricks, it is common to spend a few hours just on one second of track, sometimes even an hour or two on 1/10th of a second, making it a really long process

theacp127 wrote:When making complex manuals and quirk. The time that is required to make a track multiples by a large margin. When I first started I could make a 1:00 track in just an hour, but now it takes a couple weeks. Simple flat-sledding takes no time at all and is for the most part lazier than real tricks. Time of a track is not as important as skill and execution.

I'd beg to differ. Time of a track is just as if not more important than skill. Some tracks are extremely impressive and unique because of their length. The best example is No One Dreams Anyway. That track is absolutely stunning even though you don't need to have a lot of skill to create the tricks there. However, NODA tells a story. It has a start, a middle and an end. It build up to a climax and ends with an outro. The track wouldn't nearly be as impressive if it was only a minute long. You can't tell stories in a minute.

Also, flatsledding can take time.

Rafael wrote:

theacp127 wrote:When making complex manuals and quirk. The time that is required to make a track multiples by a large margin. When I first started I could make a 1:00 track in just an hour, but now it takes a couple weeks. Simple flat-sledding takes no time at all and is for the most part lazier than real tricks. Time of a track is not as important as skill and execution.

I'd beg to differ. Time of a track is just as if not more important than skill. Some tracks are extremely impressive and unique because of their length. The best example is No One Dreams Anyway. That track is absolutely stunning even though you don't need to have a lot of skill to create the tricks there. However, NODA tells a story. It has a start, a middle and an end. It build up to a climax and ends with an outro. The track wouldn't nearly be as impressive if it was only a minute long. You can't tell stories in a minute.

Also, flatsledding can take time.

While I can understand the comparison, I feel that NODA was so impressive because of the story it told, and not because of it's length. The only reason it wasn't able to be shorter was because the story fit in direct line with a song, which happened to be excessively long. However, Save the Princess and Happily Ever After also told a story exceptionally well. They were only a minute.

Those are scenery tracks. You can draw stories in scenery tracks, but you can't tell stories.

Drawing is a form of telling. With that being said, I'm willing to bet with the right music, I'd be able to tell a story in only thirty seconds, and probably will, just for funsies.

No, drawing is a form of presenting, not telling.

Drawing is a form of pictures and a picture is worth a thousand words. Have you ever heard of a PICTURE BOOK??? Well they consist of oh idk PICTURES. And somebody had to draw the pictures. Pictures are not just presentation. It's a story. A story that has meaning. Somebody drew that picture for a reason whether it be to look cool or not but things can be drawn away from that picture to tell a story about fiction or reality from the past future or even present. So I would re-think what you said about drawings being presentation cause you sir are wrong. Drawings show meaning and feeling.

Rafael wrote:No, drawing is a form of presenting, not telling.

What's the big difference between presenting a story and telling it? As far as I'm concerned telling a story is presenting it. I feel that arguing the difference is splitting hairs. There are times where the pictures tell the story, but other times where they just present it. Movies are basically moving pictures with audio, would you say that a film with no words can tell a story better than one or more pictures could?

Yeah I would not I would not agree that a movie with no words because to me there is less imagination involved in movie than there are with pictures. When you see a picture you make up the story that goes with it and let your imagination run wild. Would you agree with that?

Shotoku wrote:

Rafael wrote:No, drawing is a form of presenting, not telling.

What's the big difference between presenting a story and telling it? As far as I'm concerned telling a story is presenting it. I feel that arguing the difference is splitting hairs. There are times where the pictures tell the story, but other times where they just present it. Movies are basically moving pictures with audio, would you say that a film with no words can tell a story better than one or more pictures could?

Scenery tracks can display a story. Tracks can tell a story. Both sorts present stories. I guess that's a better way of saying it. The difference is comparable to the difference between movies and books.

Makes sense now lol

Do not agree in the slightest with that argument Raf.

Sounds like an interesting topic of discussion sometime then Coke