SH016 - last smile

video: various
music: Linkin Park - "Pushing Me Away"
link: depositfiles [29.8 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: August 2001

When I was planning out the videos that went into demo 1, SH014 was supposed to be "edgy" (and succeeded too well), SH015 was supposed to be "perky", and SH016 was supposed to be "new", the idea being that people would go "woah, wait, what?!" on seeing a stripper writhe on a table or a dragon blow up a building, and laugh at the weird shit that went into #15, but that anyone sticking around and talking long enough for this one to come up would have to be an anime fan already, and we would have an enhanced chance of getting them to stick around if we played up our ability to get new stuff in, at a time when it was still fairly difficult to get ahold of anime either old or new. Hence the preponderance of lesser-known sources in this one, none of which are exactly "new" nine years later, but they were pretty new when this was coming out.

There's a two-cut sub sequence in this one that was done in SSA/VDub, because a) I wanted an authentic fansub feel, and this was still the era before karaoke or color design, let alone softsubs and b) the process of doing all the text in this demo convinced me that MovieStar's internal titles were way too fucking garbage to trust this step to. Later interstitial cards would all be done in SSA onto black frames and rendered out in VDub, but that's getting ahead of the game.

The pic in this entry is from Bounty Hunter: The Hard, a kvlter-than-kvlt OVA that got put out apparently just on PAL VHS in Germany (and, apparently, Italy) in the late 1990s. I've wanted to make a video out of it for a while, but better source has been impossible to find and cleaning up the crap encode that I have is not worth it. If I'd done it back in this area when this was about the ceiling of video quality that I could achieve, it might be a goer, but not today. If anyone has a better print out there, speak up.