Insomni-Ack / In Loco Satanas - Video Detritus

Sevastopol rough cut

2011-09-08T09:52:00.002-04:00

video: Tae Guk Gi
music: Heaven Shall Burn - "Sevastopol"
link: mediafire [4.4 MB]

This is a rough cut of the first 21 seconds of a video I've been not working on for the past three months, since it was too hot to do anything. I only had the first vob cut -- there are like 6 more left, including nearly all of the content that will go in the bulk of the video -- but after such a long layoff I had to do something to assure myself that I even knew how to do this shit. Hence, this cut.

The final video is probably not going to look a lot like this, composition-wise, but the trigger behavior is probably pretty close. I may play around with the color, but in the final analysis I don't know what to do with blastbeats, especially on such a violent source and directly aggressive music, except trigger them, and it mostly works. If this was going into an actual cut, I'd've fixed some points up, but even as it is, it works ok, which is what I was trying to convince myself of.

Note: there are 8 triggered sections in these 20 seconds; compare to 28 triggers in 150 or so seconds on SH112. Granted, some of those triggered sections run on for five and ten seconds at a time, but the point remains.

SH119 - superposed

2011-06-08T08:22:00.002-04:00

video: Moonlight Mile
music: Cynic - "Integral Birth" or "Integral"
link: mediafire [47 MB]
editor: Magix 2.0+ deLuxe
production date: June 2011

This video puts two audio tracks behind one video track in order to, like SH115, attack the conventional wisdom in AMVs. Where that one shows how narrative is an emergent property in any video constructed out of a single directed source, this one demonstrates that a lot of what AMVers think of as "synch" is an emergent property of the juxtaposition of any music and any visual track.

I unintentionally picked a good pair of inputs for getting this done, if bad ones for full demonstration effect; Paul Masvidal likely arranged "Integral" to match in with "Integral Birth", probably to do a two-stereo thing like you're supposed to be able to do with some Neurosis and Tribes of Neurot records, as I found out when I had the songs on the timeline. Alternately, this is just more emergence; as anyone who knows anything about music knows, if you have two tracks that go at 120 bpm, the most they can ever be out of "synch", beatwise, is a quarter of a second, which is getting right down at the limits of perceptive closure. This, also, is one of the elements that makes this video even possible.

There may be a third one in this chain, but probably not until the fall; that one is plotted to use Atheist, some production tricks, and a 30-episode source that I need to rip and cut.

SH117 - Verlorene Herkunft: Sakana and SH118 - The Process of Calcification

2011-01-13T08:58:00.004-05:00

This is two videos released in one brick for nostalgia reasons, and also because they're kind of short individually. The classic-Earache-cover cut from last time shows up in the credits.

video: Twilight Q2 and Angel's Egg
music: Dissection - "Feathers Fell" and "No Dreams Breed In Breathless Sleep"
link: mediafire [20.6 MB]
editor: Magix 2.0+ deLuxe
production date: January 2011

From late October to the end of December 2010 I converted nearly all of my VHS collection to DVD. (There are still like six tapes that I need to macrovision-kill, but that's it.) There are other projects down the line that are going to use a lot of these homebrew DVDs as source, and I needed to make sure that they were going to work so I could set my expectations correctly.

So, I did a technical proof of concept (TPOC). This is the result, as the oh-so-clever backronym titles show. The original idea was just "Feathers Fell" and just Angel's Egg, but that was too obvious and "No Dreams..." gave some more space for editing. Twilight Q2 was a challenge to cut 40 unsubbed seconds out of and arrange into a video, so that got in on those merits as well. The music under the credits is obviously the start of "At The Fathomless Depths"; if I had Angel's Egg on DVD, I might have tried to cut a video for one of the real songs on Storm of the Light's Bane.

Why I'm Quitting This AMV Shit

2011-01-11T09:10:00.004-05:00

I'm not done yet, but I'm currently working my way through what are likely going to be the last O(15) videos on the to-do list. As old ideas get finished and new ones, by and large, do not replace them, it's easy to project ahead to a time when there are not going to be any more SH/INSO videos forthcoming. Below is a reason why this is becoming the case:

Click the picture to pop it out; the preview gives you the idea, but this is better seen on full size.

This is a frame that is not going to be part of SH118, the current project; it's from an anime that came out in 1985. As you can see, it looks like a Dan Seagrave cover, or like the contemporaneous stuff that other people were doing for Suffocation, Benediction, and, really, virtually every other death metal band of the late '80s and early '90s. Almost without exception, anime today does not look like this, and what it looks like today is difficult to work with in conjunction with the music that I prefer to use.

When I got into anime ten and more years ago, this was less the case; the moeification of the genre was well under way, but the title the above frame is from was only 15 years old, not 25, and more of the available anime universe could be described as "cel-painted machine grotesque", simply because less of the digital moeblob shit had been produced yet. In the intervening decade, though, there has been next to zero new cel-painted machine grotesque, and heaps and heaps of shiny digital garbage. Some of that has been actually good shows, but the visuals are utterly wrong and broken for my purposes. Digital has been unable, to date, to replicate the color palette of cel animation, let alone the sense of detail and lived-in reality that you get from a good cel background. The digital work that was used for the two SH videos that actually came out in 2010 was exceptional, but even those titles had their shortcomings.

So everything old is good, and everything new is bad? No, far from it; there's a lot of crap that was produced prior to 1998 (when digital started coming in) as well -- under-animated, underdrawn, artifacted, stupid, useless, having-giant-robots-without-Tokyo-police-badges-on-them; there's a lot of titles afflicted with these problems that disqualify them from likely ever getting into a SH video. However, it's indisputable that the pool of titles I want to work with is small, slants older, and is continually shrinking.

A lot of the titles I'd want to work with, I've already done so; this is kind of an occupational hazard of making 117 videos and having a policy, mostly, of not picking a source up again when it's been used in a demo or another video. In addition to use, there are other titles falling out of the pool due to natural factors: a lot of early-90s OVAs were poorly transferred to DVD or not transferred at all, and as time goes by fewer and fewer LDs and VHS tapes remain, and fewer and fewer players for the same remain functional. There may be cool stuff out there that I'd want to work with, but if I can't get it and put it in a usable form, it effectively doesn't exist.

Things could change, and someone could solve the shininess issue that makes most modern anime fall out of contention, but I really suspect that it isn't likely to; the audience has changed too much, and too many people want sparkles and cute, regardless of how lame the underlying content is, for the artstyles and cinematographic styles that I'm looking for to make much of a comeback. Hence, it's likely that I'm going to be done for good sometime before the end of 2013.

SH116 - The Spark

2011-01-08T07:36:00.004-05:00

video: Great Teacher Onizuka
music: Ensign - "Left Hand Syndrome"
link: mediafire [16.2 MB]
editor: Magix 2.0+ deLuxe
production date: January 2011

The commitment to finishing out the existing idea queue is manifest in this one; under normal circumstances, you don't make melodic hardcore videos when you're closer to 40 than 20, but this is an idea that dates back to when that wasn't true. Other stuff got in the way, but here it is completed, and resolutely earnest and irony-free. "Some say that rock critics hang on to rock music because they want to preserve their youth, but this is stupid: say rather that they want to preserve their rebellion."

All The Gorram Videos, Seriously

2010-12-03T14:05:00.006-05:00

Now that the catalog repost is done, this post is up as an index of every SH and INSO and otherwise video (that actually got published; SH034 and SH090 are obviously still absent). Like other things that there are too many of to really make sense of by straight count, they are arranged by 'era' below for easier browsing. This post will continue to be updated as new videos are completed and posted.

If a link is dead, comment on the post and I'll put it back up.

Shin Hatsubai

Old MPEG1 Stuff
SH001 -- SH002 -- SH003 -- SH004
SH005 -- SH006 -- SH007 -- SH008
SH009 -- SH010 -- SH011 -- SH012
SH013 -- SH014 -- SH015 -- SH016

(Yes, SH011 wasn't technically built this way, but yes, it's still in this section.)

WTF Is This MPEG2 Stuff
SH017 -- SH018 -- SH019 -- SH020
SH021 -- SH022 -- SH023 -- SH024
SH025 -- SH026 -- SH027

I Have Basically No Classes And No Filter
SH028 -- SH029 -- SH030 -- SH031
SH032 -- SH033 -- SH035 -- SH036
SH037 -- SH038 -- SH039 -- SH040
SH041 -- SH042

Unsuccessfully Coping With The Natural Beauty of .org-Driven Inadequacy
SH043 -- SH044 -- SH045 -- SH046
SH047 -- SH048 -- SH049 -- SH050
SH051 -- SH052 -- SH053 -- SH054
SH055 -- SH056 -- SH057 -- SH058
SH059 -- SH060 -- SH061 -- SH062
SH063

The Capture Card's Second, Better, Lease On Life
SH064 -- SH065 -- SH066 -- SH067
SH068 -- SH069 -- SH070 -- SH071
SH072 -- SH073 -- SH074 -- SH075
SH076 -- SH077 -- SH078 -- SH079
SH080 -- SH081 -- SH082 -- SH083

Shit Gets Weird
SH084 -- SH085 -- SH086 -- SH087
SH088 -- SH089 -- SH091 -- SH092

Finally, A Real NLE
SH093 -- SH094 -- SH095 -- SH096
SH097 -- SH098 -- SH099 -- SH100
SH101 -- SH102 -- SH103 -- SH104
SH105 -- SH106 -- SH107 -- SH108
SH109

Dead And Well Satisfied
SH110 -- SH111 -- SH112 -- SH113
SH114 -- SH115 -- SH116 -- SH117
SH118 -- SH119

Insomni-Ack/BAS

BAS Demo intros/outros
BAS01 -- BAS05 -- BAS06 -- BAS11
BAS12 -- BAS17

Insomni-Ack Non-AMVs
INSO00 -- INSO01 -- INSO02 -- INSO03
INSO04 -- INSO05 -- INSO06 -- INSO07
INSO09 -- INSO10 -- INSO11 -- INSO12
INSO13 -- INSO14 -- INSO15 -- INSO16
INSO17

SH114 - six signs the circle

2010-12-03T13:49:00.003-05:00

video: Otogi Zoshi
music: Kreator - "Lucretia (My Reflection)" (cover)
link: mediafire [30.5 MB]
editor: Magix 2.0+ deLuxe
production date: February 2010

Though this video has a lot more in common with SH094 than with SH064, it didn't get into Anime Boston while the video sent as an afterthought did. Seven years' distance, same weird behavior. Sure, this video may be a little impenetrable if you're not paying attention, and hard to classify regardless, but that's not quite a reason for the contest to self-trollinate by putting Parasitic on the big screen.

SH113 - fryste

2010-12-03T13:38:00.004-05:00

video: Beyond The Clouds
music: The Mountain Goats - "Maybe Sprout Wings"
link: mediafire [18.1 MB]
editor: Magix 2.0+ deLuxe
production date: December 2009

The preview image is supposed to look that fuzzy, if not fuzzier; the point of the effects design in this video was to simulate a cheap camera lens freezing over whenever I could squeeze it in. Maybe at long last this "taste" thing is burrowing into the SH ethos; maybe so, maybe not.

SH112 - Knee Deep In Disease

2010-12-03T13:11:00.003-05:00

video: Moyashimon
music: Parasitic Extirpation - "Stabwound Symmetry"
link: mediafire [49.1 MB]
editor: Magix 2.0+ deLuxe
production date: December 2009

This was the first SH HD video. I screwed up a lot of stuff in the preproduction end that made doing Causality a lot easier once it got fixed, so this had a useful development purpose, and also introduced the AMV world to Parasitic Extirpation. Now go buy their stuff, you leech, Casketless is awesome.

SH111 - weiß nix wie ich sagn soll

2010-12-03T12:46:00.004-05:00

video: Umi Ga Kikoeru, Only Yesterday
music: Fettes Brot - "Yasmin"
link: mediafire [50.3 MB]
editor: Magix 2.0+ deLuxe
production date: October 2009

This video is probably more complex than it needs to be, or than the song can really support, but one way or another kind of works. I feel sorry for people who don't rate the effects design here as especially difficult or intense; this was some pretty heavy lifting, and doing stuff that is substantially harder and more time-consuming is no way to make videos.

SH110 - peloton

2010-12-03T12:28:00.002-05:00

video: Nasu: Summer In Andalusia
music: Mad Fret - "Sunflower" (instrumental, edited)
link: mediafire [40.3 MB]
editor: Magix 2.0+ deLuxe
production date: November 2008

The huge gulf between SH109 and this is for several reasons. At the time I did SH109, the idea that was slotted into that catalog number the day before -- which got pushed to a notional SH110 -- was a challenging one involving a lot of animation and original footage that proved ultimately too difficult to get off the ground. Also, work was hard and intense in 2007, covering not only the Korea trip where I got the sources for this, but several other outings to various places in the United States; Maine twice including immediately before Korea, once to Dallas in March, and twice to Austin. 5/6 of 2007 was blocked up going here, there and everywhere....and then I got laid off in November and spent the last two months getting a new job and getting my feet under me.

I did do my Conet stuff in '07, but that was under heavy pressure from the admins, and as noted, early in the year. The rest of 2007, and most of 2008 as I adjusted to the new culture and new environment, were no-gos for video and substantially for most of my other hobbies. How things go; as it was, I'll take the tradeoff in order to have been out of work for only six weeks in this recession.

Fucking Ideas, How Do They Work?

2010-12-02T15:35:00.005-05:00

As part of the continuing delusion that I make AMVs any more, I've completed the first shakeout of my to-do list in almost three years, with some probably uninteresting results.

If everything on the current list gets made and nothing that isn't, I'll finish up with SH130. This is probably going to be about accurate, because though there are four ideas on the list that I have no real idea of the viability of, there are a lot of long cuts on the list that difficulty and plain old inertia will push the finishing of all those ideas out for at least five years in the most likely case, and new ideas are probably going to come in inside that span.

Slightly more interesting is the vintage of the ideas concerned; this breaks out as follows:
2000 - 1
2001 -0
2002 - 1
2003 - 0
2004 - 2
2005 - 1
2006 - 1
2007 - 0
2008 - 1
2009 - 1
2010 - 7

I've been keeping a to-do list since 2000, before I even started making these things, and while most of the current ideas are actually current, there are a few that have been carried along from the very start. This has major implications for the anticipated delay of finishing up: ten of the fifteen ideas on the drawing board, and six of the eight that have been around for more than a year, involve cutting at least 20 episodes or episode-equivalents. Several are a lot longer than that.

This is a graph of current ideas of year X vintage versus videos produced that year. Most of what I've done is based on relatively new ideas; SH110 in 2008 was a 2007 idea, SH111 was a 2008 in 2009, SH112 and 113 were 2009 ideas in '09, SH114 had been around as an idea since '06, and SH115 was a '10 idea and production. If a video idea is doable quickly, it tends to get done quickly; the hard ideas stick around as newer projects get promoted past them, and the crap ideas, like those four that I haven't actually done any checking on may turn out to be, die off and fall out of the list unproduced. This is the hard part of crushing out the ideas that are left and winding up the studio: by taking the path of least resistance, I end up saving the hardest part for last.

The other way of looking at that, though, is that these ideas are, like SH070, not coming into being before their time: that now, at the end of the road, I either have the skills to pull them off correctly or the composure to toss them out as unworkable. At the very least, the future is looking bright musically: those fifteen ideas break out into ten metal, two hardcore, one punk, and only two songs outside that bailiwick. The more I enjoy working with this stuff, the more likely it is that it all gets done.

SH109 - Riot of Violence

2010-12-02T14:11:00.004-05:00

video: Muteki Kanban Musume (aka Ramen Fighter Miki)
music: Municipal Waste - "Sweet Attack"
link: mediafire [22.2 MB]
editor: Magix 2.0+ deLuxe
production date: November 2006

After this video, Shin Hatsubai effectively ceased to be an active studio. Debatably, the mark-out point was even earlier; this was put together in the space of a couple hours because Con Ja Nai was short on videos for their contest. As can be seen elsewhere, starting in August and more seriously as fall 2006 went on, I was going to a lot of shows, at least one a week, and that was really taking over in terms of time and attention. At the time, this was a decent way to go out.

SH108 - moji

2010-12-02T13:54:00.004-05:00

video: Black Heaven
music: Knorkator - "[Buchstabe]" (the actual title is a glyph not recognized by Unicode)
link: mediafire [42.3 MB]
editor: Magix 2.0+ deLuxe
production date: September 2006

This is the result of a very simple and very stupid idea: to remake, as close to frame-for-frame or at least shot-for-shot as possible, Knorkator's brilliant official video for this song. This was a lot of work, mostly because matching footage frame for frame is hard, and partly because Black Heaven is poorly animated and has a lot of bad cinematography. I still got most of what I needed and did not much reuse footage more than the band reused setups in the original video.

I'm not putting out a side-by-side due to copyright concerns (and laziness). Do it your own damn self. Or, after you give up because it is a stupid idea with no payoff, watch more Knorkator.

SH107 - lass mich

2010-12-02T13:42:00.004-05:00

video: Spirited Away
music: In Extremo - "Die Gier"
link: mediafire [33.8 MB]
editor: Magix 2.0+ deLuxe
production date: July 2006

This video is the start of a six-video sequence spanning almost three and a half years in which only one has an intelligible English soundtrack, and half of them are in German. (This one, SH108, and SH111; SH110 is an instrumental and SH112 is in death speranto.) It is a decent video, if a little bound by its source and limited by the fact that I'm not very good at masking, and not nearly as pretentious as the .org entry for it, which I keep meaning to rewrite and never do, would imply.

SH106 - As Charged

2010-12-02T13:24:00.003-05:00

video: Maria-sama ni wa Naisho
music: Municipal Waste - "Guilty of Being Tight"
link: mediafire [24.6 MB]
editor: Magix 2.0+ deLuxe
production date: May 2006

This is the 'good-mix' version of INSO10, using the SD omake because I cut it first to do the bridge in the song and ended up having enough to do the whole thing. The intro is in the song originally as a drop-in; the ultimate source of it is of course Phantasm.

SH105 - a declaration

2010-12-02T13:01:00.004-05:00

video: Initial D
music: Bruce Springsteen - "Independence Day"
link: mediafire [45.1 MB]
editor: Magix 2.0+ deLuxe
production date: February 2006

The production date on this is not strictly accurate. I started work on this video in October of 2005, making it the first of a troubling trend of large projects that take way too fucking long. The cut was a nightmare due to how much cleaning I had to do to the source, and then after that editing in itself was tough. I was dealing with weird hours, a tough commute, and increased time demands from other stuff; pretty much how my life has gone since, which is why it feels so familiar: five years later, I'm working on a long cut from a bad Tokyopop print that started in October and won't turn into a video until well into the next year.

This is also the video in which I officially turned old. When you have a young person make a video with Bruce and a show about street racing, it doesn't turn out like this.

SH104 - Fucking Rat

2010-12-01T12:02:00.003-05:00

video: Pokemon
music: Crazy Frog - "Axel F"
link: mediafire [33.4 MB]
editor: Magix 2.0+ deLuxe
production date: September 2005

In Germany you can make AMVs at the grocery store. All source for this video was picked up for less than 30 euros total at the Streisen Kaufland store. This was only part of the motivation for this abortion; the rest of it is based on personal history.

SH103 - still waters fall frozen

2010-12-01T11:43:00.003-05:00

video: Lunar Legend Tsukihime
music: Iron Horse - "Unforgiven" (cover, duh)
link: mediafire [58.2 MB]
editor: Magix 2.0+ deLuxe
production date: September 2005

There were various things going on when this video was released that made the .org writeup of it sound pretty fucking bleak. I don't think it's that bleak, looking back, but the bleak elements are there definitely as much as the deliberately-inserted multi-level black-humor bits.

Between SH102 and this one I did the AMV Hell bits that were eventually collected into INSO08. However, that one didn't get published here when I was doing the INSO writeups, and it's not going to get published now. That the link on its .org entry is dead is probably for the best; I'm not going to go soliciting requests and will only upload that if someone takes the effort to contact me on their own hook.

While watching this show initially, and again when cutting for this video, I took various stabs at writing a fandub script for something working-titled "Potential Incest Legend Unspellable", in the tradition of Studio Sokodei's works. This is probably never going to turn into anything real or releasable; if anyone wants the ~55-65%-completed script, including a bunch of suggested music and incomprehensible injokes, give me a holler, I've got it lying around somewhere.

SH102 - Sundown in Caesarea - eatdrinkbleedvomit

2010-12-01T11:30:00.003-05:00

video: Requiem From The Darkness
music: Morbid Angel - "Where The Slime Live"
link: mediafire [69.9 MB]
editor: Magix 2.0+ deLuxe
production date: June 2005

This was mostly an attempt to do an AMV version of the official video, which is super wicked awesome. There are several cuts in this directly inspired/influenced by that videography, though I'm pretty sure they're not in the same places. The bad/weird voice acting at the start and end over the Burzum samples is my own; this was recorded in the Dresden field office wicked late at night because it was only there that I could be sure of a silent environment. My apartment was normally ok, but you don't want to be put in the position of apologizing for dings.

SH101 - hammerpoch

2010-12-01T11:17:00.003-05:00

video: Requiem From The Darkness
music: Geinoh Yamashirogumi - "Kaneda"
link: mediafire [33.1 MB]
editor: Magix 2.0+ deLuxe
production date: June 2005

Like SH001, this video is built all out of a single episode (#9 in this series if I recall correctly), and pretty much ends on a gunshot. That's about as far as the similarities go. Doing this as one-ep was not only a constraint on this video, but as it turned out, on SH102; despite using the same title, I didn't want to recut stuff that I cut for this video, or use second-run source that didn't get into this one, so in some kind of weird way these two videos could be regarded as two parts of the same whole. It certainly didn't work that way while I was cutting it, though.

SH100 - Looking Back, Looking Suspicious

2010-12-01T11:03:00.005-05:00

video: various (SH001 to SH099) + Dogtato-kun
music: Dropkick Murphys - "Amazing Grace"
link: mediafire [26.5 MB]
editor: Magix 2.0+ deLuxe
production date: May 2005

This video includes one cut, in sequence, from each video from SH001 to SH099. When you hit a ridiculous milestone like this, you can get away with a retrospective.....or at least, having done so, I'm not going to begrudge anyone else doing it.

Since this one, like SH099 through SH105, was done while I was in Germany, all the source here is the distro versions rather than the masters of those videos. Since there's not that much that remastering could really do about that, you can see what the SH catalog used to look like before the 2008 remasters that are getting posted here.

SH099 - woher kommst du nach spa$%@##!?&%^^^^x

2010-11-30T14:00:00.003-05:00

video: Argent Soma
music: The Mountain Goats - "Family Happiness"
link: mediafire [29.4 MB]
editor: Magix 2.0+ deLuxe
production date: May 2005

Despite the remastering, the video is still supposed to look like that. This was the first time that I'd done something like this deliberately; there are projects in the pipeline that will really push the line of deliberate lo-fi in AMV, should I ever get around to them.

SH098 - Sing Loud Sing Proud For Your Scene!

2010-11-30T13:42:00.004-05:00

video: Cromartie High School
music: Dropkick Murphys - "For Boston"
link: mediafire [15.9 MB]
editor: Magix 2.0+ deLuxe
production date: April 2005

The introduction to this video basically sets it up: people in black clothing doing stupid things to loud music, an animated version of being drunk on the sidewalk during a set change. I don't cover nearly all the bands I could have in the blur at the end -- even as I was in 2005 -- but then again, the animation doesn't cover dudes throwing an inflatable fish into traffic or "magically" turning an abandoned wallet into arm candy. We'll just have to live with that.

Those wanting more reality (and more 4chan) in their view of Boston DIY are advised to check out RTTP. For the exceptionally dense or bad-at-reading-sidebars, my further drunken sidewalk badinage is over that way.

SH097 - swords cross enn Midgarth

2010-11-30T12:53:00.003-05:00

video: X/1999
music: Hypocrisy - "Adjusting The Sun"
link: mediafire [47.1 MB]
editor: Magix 2.0+ deLuxe
production date: April 2005

This is a remake of SH005, but as noted on there, materially different in a lot of ways, which led to it becoming its own video, about four years after the original. There are parts of it that are improved, and other parts that don't match up to the original -- whether because of closure closing differently or just pure nostalgia, I can't say, but the difference is there regardless.

SH096 - GOD HATES US ALL

2010-11-30T12:21:00.004-05:00

video: various
music: Slayer - "Disciple" (original remix/edit)
link: mediafire [23.8 MB]
editor: Magix 2.0+ deLuxe
production date: April 2005

Don't let the otaku lead you down the garden path, there are some absolutely fucking vomitous, cut-your-own-throat-worthy shows out there. Most of the time, you can avoid them, but sometimes, when you do staff for cons, you have to sit there and refrain from killing yourself for an hour and a half to make sure that the AV system doesn't commit suicide in protest over what it's being asked to show.

This happened to me. I survived, but carrying a bowl of wrath that eventually had to get poured out sometime. Modern Slayer has its debits to be sure, but also its strengths, and pouring out bowls of wrath is one of those.

SH095 - Sakigake!! Takino Tomo!

2010-11-30T11:54:00.005-05:00

video: Azumanga Daioh
music: HammerFall - "I Want Out" (cover)
link: mediafire [38.8 MB]
editor: Magix 2.0+ deLuxe
production date: March 2005

Fundamentally, this video is an idea hijack that is better documented in its .org entry, since I wrote that up already. It was at its time part of a deluge of AzuDai videos that, with the passage of years, is no longer a mark against it.

You can see the same sort of exuberance in being able to do effects easily here as you can in some parts of SH093; this is something I still struggle with, coming out of a place where every effect had to be part of the effects design to somewhere where no design is necessary, and imposing one is difficult. Here, like before and maybe not on subsequent videos, the randomness I think works in the video's favor. This is a splashy source with a splashy song that has been screwed around with to move even faster, so the introduction of random shiny objects goes less amiss.

There's also crap interlace-removal throughout this video, and indeed everything before like SH103. This is due to the 'learn by doing' stuff again; do all the interlace removal Magix allows you, and don't for the love of Christ build a MPEG2 master. You don't need to do that any more, you don't even work in that goddamned codec.

SH094 - Thunder Road

2010-11-04T18:00:00.004-04:00

video: Galaxy Express 999 movies
music: Metallica - "Turn The Page" (cover)
link: mediafire [58.9 MB]
editor: Magix 2.0+ deLuxe
production date: February 2005

This was the first video that I hit Magix's internal 'wall' on. I don't know what this is, even to this day, but it is some combination of length and complexity of video that overloads the editor, a "you shall not pass", that whenever it hits, leaves you no alternative but to go back, blow out the last clip or couple clips placed, render what ya got, thunk out the large raw onto the timeline, uncheck the interlacing options, and pick up where you left off, a wearisome 10- to 30-minute process that strikes about once a minute to once every three minutes in terms of edited video. At the time I didn't know what it was, nor how to handle it; over the three wall hits in this video, I learned, and learned how to anticipate it. Much like the stupid kludge that I had to get through to get my older environment to work, it became something to deal with not something to change environments over. It's been joined in that caption by interlacing on speed change and the environment's inability to do two filters at the same time, but this was the first and most aggravating.

SH093 - ded-kat-in-a-sak blooz

2010-11-04T17:44:00.003-04:00

video: Cat Soup
music: Bix Beiderbecke - "Singin' The Blues"
link: mediafire [31.4 MB]
editor: Magix 2.0+ deLuxe
production date: January 2005

INSO4 was a shakedown for Magix, after I'd gotten everything together on Battlefreak, which six years and a bunch of hardware and software upgrades later is still somehow viable as an edit station. This was the first SH AMV under the new system, and there are still some bugs evident in the process. Actually, there are a lot of bugs, but the weirdness of the video makes them a little more difficult to notice. It wasn't for another six months that I really got a hold on how and what to do with regards output and stuff in Magix. Learn by doing, learn by doing.

SH092 - 0x0075 0x2ec4 [[ch]ILL] 0x59b8

2010-11-04T17:27:00.004-04:00

video: GANTZ, Wind - a breath of heart - (TV)
music: Meridian - "Abraham Timecode"
link: mediafire [30.3 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: October 2004

This was the last video I did in Dazzle, and the last video I did as a student. It is probably the most SH SH video that exists, taking on brutal subjects with unorthodox as well as orthodox inputs and featuring both black metal and heavy picture damage. Most of the damage was done by thresholding the input (with a heavy blur to smooth out the edges, a technique that pretty much originated for my purposes on SH069), but after that was done, I reprocessed the source files to layer a static pattern -- which shows up in a couple places unmodified in the video, because what's the point, overlaying static with static -- over it. The intent was to get the video to look like an over-photocopied DIY flyer that's been stapled to a telephone pole and gotten rained on several times in the last few weeks. I think it succeeded, but even at this, I fell short of what I was actually trying to do.

The original effects design on this was supposed to used something referred to as 'punchcarding', a term that came up as a descriptor for a defect in the way WMP (if I recall correctly, it's frickin six years ago now) was presenting videos at one point in time, on one dude's laptop, at the Animania table following some showing or another. Little black boxes, like chads out of a punchcard, popping up here and there at random on the video. A ghost pattern, something we couldn't replicate, but which looked ceaselessly cool. I tried to write an AviSynth script to replicate it on this video in a post build, but apparently it went into an infinite recursion and hung the system. No dice. Maybe I'll try again at some point in the future.

Regardless, both the "rained-on flyer" design here and the "etchasketch hit with a baseball bat" effects design used in INSO13/14 are attempts to do punchcarding. I haven't let it go even yet, and it will not be surprising if another video gets mutilated towards this goal sometime down the line.

SH091 - Zero Zero J-Gei Shakedown

2010-11-04T17:09:00.003-04:00

video: various (mostly H) games (ok, and some anime)
music: Cales - "Days of Emptiness"
link: mediafire [ MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: September 2004

SH090 doesn't appear between this entry and the last one for reasons that will become clear sometime in the next two weeks from the date of this posting. A list of all the titles in this video, which were mostly sourced from Canned Dogs and Distribution in a variety of weird and initially useless formats, can be found on the .org video entry.

Despite the sourcing, this is a non-H video, suitable for all audiences (ok, all audiences over the age of about 13 if you want to get all MPAA about an exhortation to "turn that fucking TV off"). There's a lot of generic eroge girls, but there is also come 3d-CGed horseracing, which is probably the first and last time such has gotten dropped into an AMV.

SH089 - Reflections

2010-11-04T16:43:00.004-04:00

video: Prince of Tennis
music: Nightingale - "The Glory Days"
link: mediafire [44.2 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: July 2004

This video had a lot of technical problems in the assembly process and even more at mixdown. This was getting to be typical, because my editing station was on its last legs, and the kludge-based process that was allowing me to keep going, plus the fact that the last four videos in that environment were built out of often severely damaged source, was showing the edges of its limitations.

It's worth looking back at that environment; originally built in 1998 and substantially rebuilt in 2001, at this point Keystone was somewhere between four and six years old, still using an OS that most people would barely trust to run their filesystem correctly, let alone make AMVs in, and souped up with parts acquired from random, often sketchy sources. Somehow, it all held together, dependent on hardware assists and a particular crazy-quilt processing chain, and produced, in the end, 101 AMVs and re-edited-video-things-that-are-not-AMVs. There's some nostalgia for it, but I really suspect this is chiefly because the box in question doesn't boot up any more, and I can't touch the tools again and remember how stupid and difficult everything was.

SH088 - -- (rubicons)

2010-11-03T16:41:00.003-04:00

video: Munto OAV
music: In Flames - interstitial track, Soundtrack To Your Escape
link: mediafire [12.8 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar, Virtual Dub
production date: May 2004

The .org entry for this video lists the music as "Touch of Red". As explained in the entry over there, this is not exactly correct. The music is stored in track 4 on the CD, but it's not really part of the actual song. Instead, it's an undescribed interstitial coming in between that song and "Like You Better Dead". On the excessively remote chance that someone who knows the band ever comes across this, before you tell me to gtfo and take the link down, fill me in on what they call this thing on their rehearsal tapes or whatever.

I did not steal pre-cel pencils for this anime or something in order to make the video. Not only do those not exist because the show was digitally animated, cel painting inherently destroys pencil work and even if such pencils did exist it would have been way too much fucking work for zero return. Instead, animation paint was stripped out the simple and easy way with Lags/Ben Greenwood's difference filter, which is or should be the centerpiece of every filter chain that needs to quickly and efficiently turn a colored-in image back into lines. The point was to turn the video back into pencils, so I didn't throw in a threshold like I did on INSO13.

SH087 - if I only close my eyes ()

2010-11-03T16:20:00.003-04:00

video: Stratos 4
music: Subway Mirror - "Forever Young"
link: mediafire [21.6 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: April 2004

This video to a pretty large extent explains itself, and is a decently quick enough download to do so in expedited fashion. The broader issue is why I did it with a local band from Sweden; that answer, alas, isn't available any more.

In late 2003, Dan Swano decided to do up swano.com as a personal website, since no one else was using it for anything. (It's still unregistered now, which helps explain why.) This was a good idea, and he'd probably have it yet if he didn't have the bright idea to convert nearly everything he'd ever recorded with bands that never made it onto a label to mp3 and put it up there. It was a beautiful site, and tremendously informative in its insights into his development as a musician and a producer, but in bandwidth terms it was an utter underestimation of the fanatic attraction of prog metal geeks the world over to music that is weird, kvlt, free, and easily available. The site died hard and fast. I probably helped kill it, but if I hadn't, I wouldn't have a lot of weird, awesome Swano stuff today, and I wouldn't be able to republish it in forms like this video. Your tragedy of the commons in action, ladies and gentlemen.

SH086 - the Wolverine Blues

2010-11-03T15:55:00.004-04:00

video: various
music: The Gathering - "Broken Glass"
link: mediafire [60 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar, SSMM
production date: March 2004

This video comes with a nice cautionary tale about doing proper stress tests before going live. I did this as a demo for Animania and handed it off, in DVD-quality MPEG2 form (the master used to make the XVID linked above) to the dude running the showing to show over intermission, not thinking too much of it. During intermission, as I'm selling raffle tickets and generally scuttlebutting with other staffers, the head (the dude mocked by SH085) comes running out of the showing room to chew out the guy who was running the projector -- this video'd crashed it. There was a big kickup, but I did have a knocked-down version on hand to show, and that didn't have an utterly annihilating data rate in certain sections.

If you download the video, you can skip to about 4:10 to see what done it. There's a lot of manga panes in this video, and they are running at 30 fps. Nice and sharp and almost 100% turnover frame to frame -- and it runs over the entirety of the trem solo basically from that mark to the end of the video. I didn't have any problems with the MPEG2, despite my old editing station at the time, probably because I had a capture card in it, and the MPEG2 processing was getting routed through the chip on there. The showing PC, not having any such convenience, HCF'd. The moral's simple; test, test test, and on systems that resemble your production infrastructure as closely as possible.

SH085 - Ryoma-sama e love Ian

2010-11-03T15:38:00.005-04:00

video: Prince of Tennis
music: Richard Marx - "Right Here Waiting" (remix)
link: mediafire [20.6 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar, Acid
production date: December 2003

At the time that I did this video (as a tail-twist on the president of Animania at the time) I was on a bit of a techno kick, listening to relatively more Terror Organ, GMO, modern Ulver, and Teargas & Plateglass than I have before or since (see also SH086), and the soundtrack to this one, a remix completely original to this video, shows the influence. The oskulumObszenum material I was composing at about the same time is probably never going to get released; I have about an EP's worth of stuff for the proposed Attack Semantics record, but it needs about 15 more minutes on 2-3 songs to really justify its own existence, and I don't even have enough time these days to write and record Coelem stuff, a project I actually care about, let alone finish a bad techno record that can't decide whether it wants to be darkwave or happy hardcore.

SH084 - Gunwomen of the Apocalypse

2010-11-03T15:16:00.003-04:00

video: Early Reins
music: Seatbelts - "Go Go Cactus Man"
link: mediafire [26.5 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: November 2003

After Project Haibane and the three non-explicitly-related Excel Saga videos in sequence, it was becoming clear that long cuts and other large-scope project elements were essentially incompatible with being in grad school. Fifteen hours of class, fifteen to thirty hours of labwork/homework, twenty hours at work, and about 25 hours a week hiking to class and work and such chopped sharply into the time available for editing. Thus the overwhelming bias in this period, as seen in this one and on the next couple entries, for weird videos on a smaller source pool. This is also, I think, a reaction to the emerging heyday of AMVs and the fact that I was falling further off the pace technologically; there was a greater pressure towards what would become a core idea, to make the AMV that will not exist otherwise, in order to avoid duplicating effort under an environment where every second was precious.

INSO02 - Howl From The Soul

2010-11-02T10:19:00.004-04:00

video: Excel Saga
music: Death - "Voice Of The Soul"
link: mediafire [37.1 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar, well, as such
production date: October 2003

The reason this wasn't posted up here between INSO01 and INSO03 is that unlike those videos, and for that matter every other INSO video except INSO08 (which isn't getting republished here for other reasons), it has a .org catalog entry and thus tends to get treated as part of the 'main sequence' of SH videos. The reason it has that catalog entry is that I got convinced, about a year after actually making it, that it was worth publishing, as an AMV that is not immediately obvious as non-edited. All cuts in this one are cut in the source, with no effort expended in reassembling; I cut in at the right in-point, out when the music was over, and faded up and down. Honest; check it for yourself if you've got the DVD or know where to steal this episode from.

In a way, this is a remote and indirect ancestor to SH115; the synch in this one is partially there and partially closure, but the idea that the meaning in the original animation is tracking the movement in this song, but only in this particular section that is neither the start nor the end of the portion of the episode it comes from, is pure closure. Well, that, or some outstanding luck, but we all know which way Occam's razor is slicing this one.

SH083 - Don't Watch This Video

2010-11-02T10:07:00.003-04:00

video: Excel Saga
music: Metallica - "So What" (ok, ok, cover)
link: mediafire normal [32.6 MB], chipmunk mix [17.1 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: October 2003

It was a real struggle to come up with a non-obscene picture that would represent this video accurately. The above one pretty much encapsulates exactly the level of subtlety that should be expected from this video, as well as the subject matter and maturity level. The title is there for a reason.

The chipmunk mix is a result of a 100% acceleration and 50% decimation in Virtual Dub, but despite the simple change is still funnier than the regular version of the video.

SH082 - We've Come For Your Cheez Balls

2010-11-02T09:50:00.004-04:00

video: Excel Saga
music: Hypocrisy - "Evil Invaders" (cover)
link: mediafire [41 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: October 2003

This is an action video that keeps getting classed as comedy because of a) the source and b) the fact that it's funny, even just as funny-stupid. Overcompartmentalization sucks and will kill action AMVs more surely than all the noob edits in the world, and more people need to watch The Long Good Friday.

The "cover" note is here and not on the few other videos that it applies to because if I didn't put it in, these dudes would whine ceaselessly.

SH081 - lost in days of blood

2010-11-02T08:34:00.003-04:00

video: Blood Reign - Curse of the Yoma
music: Sentenced - "Dead Moon Rising"
link: mediafire [47 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: September 2003

This was the eighth and so far last Sentenced video from SH. Long strange trip indeed. There are a couple more ideas in, including one of the first ideas I ever put together as a planned AMV back in October 2000, but for one reason or another I haven't actually done a Sentenced video in the last seven years.

SH080 - Under Control

2010-11-02T08:17:00.003-04:00

video: You're Under Arrest mini-specials
music: C.W. McCall - "Lewis and Clark"
link: mediafire [24.2 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: August 2003

This is probably the most un-SH SH video, showing clearly the pernicious influence of the .org, but that's not the reason why it came out the way it did. The main reason it looks like it does is that the ideas for this one were very clearly overrunning the limitations of what I was able to do in Dazzle. You cannot make a lipsynch video in this, or pretty much any other linear editor, and doing so is harder still when you don't have frame-accurate playback. Trying to hack out a clunky comedy video that runs solely on lipsynch in such an editor is not the most adaptive idea in the world. However, there's a reason that I haven't done anything like this since moving to a real NLE. This, too, is ok; I'm comfortable with my growth arc of developing my own ideas in isolation, confronting and struggling with conventional wisdom, then moving beyond that, influenced by it nonetheless, to do what I want to do in the way that results in the final product most closely resembling the initial idea.

Griping about influences aside, this was also sharply constrained by the source. There is not a whole lot of good animation in this title, so even for super YUA fans, this is pushing the edge of being a ripoff.

SH079 - Into The Lungs Of Hell

2010-10-29T11:37:00.005-04:00

video: Kujaku-oh
music: Gamma Ray - "Fire Below" (edit)
link: mediafire [34.5 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: July 2003

This video was done as a test of zero-cost-of-access AMVing, the idea being to make a video that doesn't require any prior knowledge of the sources going in to appreciate. This is a giant problem in AMVs; on the one hand, people talk down mindless action and insist that story is king, and on the other they go build semantic content into their videos, often without realizing it, that requires prior knowledge of the source in order to parse out the "story." I fucking hate that shit, and ultimately, it's counterproductive.

I got into anime in substantial measure due to AMVs (the rest was an absolutely nontrivial amount of luck in which episode of Marmalade Boy Jo-chan had up on a now-certainly-extinct website in the second week of October 2000), and that would not have been possible if the videos I was watching required prior knowledge. If you haven't watched a show and sit down to watch a video from it and find yourself asking "who the fuck are these people? in what world do these transitions make sense? why should I care?", then the editor has failed, badly, by failing at ZCoA. I'm not going to pretend that my works are in any way perfect in this regard, but I at least try to make what I do independent of the source material, and this one, using a source that I'm pretty sure zero people in the modern AMV audience are remotely familiar with, was the acid test of that. It's not a complicated video, but it's functional and should be intelligible regardless of how much or how little the viewer takes into it.

Of course, I did another experiment seven years later that essentially invalidates this one -- the point of Causality is that due to narrative closure, story is an emergent property of anything cut out of a scripted source just as much as perceptual closure makes synch an emergent property of any juxtaposition of music and video. Even when the editor requires, consciously or unconsciously, that information from the source be taken in, the fact of scripted material being used will result in the naive viewer imposing their own understanding of narrative on the video they're watching. When we assume intent, we try to figure out that intent, at least to create something that seems internally consistent from our vantage point. It may be weird and incorrect, but it'll be there. All ZCoA does is attempt to reduce the error bars on that internal narrative.

Project Haibane - SH075 through SH078

2010-10-29T10:38:00.010-04:00

This post contains four videos that are part of a larger project, the only one I've done thus far. They can be viewed in sequence (as initially intended) or separately; to make it easier for those who want to view them in series, this is being done as one post. Comments appear for each video and there are some more on the whole project at the bottom.

--

SH075 - worn soule

video: Haibane Renmei
music: Bill O'Brien - "Old Shoes"
link: mediafire [38.3 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: June 2003

This was the first idea that I got, which was the germ of the project...which actually didn't get going until I got the idea for SH078 and realized that it was going to take several videos to say what I wanted to about this title. This is hence one of the few cases of anime-first editing in this catalog...but then again, Haibane is worth going into anime-first. Seriously, watch this show if you haven't, or even if you're just here for the music.

The artist isn't linked here not because Bill's politically controversial (he isn't, especially for Massachusetts, where he lives now, or Madison, WI, where this song was written and recorded), but because there is literally zero information on the guy on the internet. The CDDB entries for Cool At The Union are lifted from the comp I made of it and the Willis Reed EP off my folks' vinyl. No information, no point in linking to dead ends. The best article is probably here, but that really only gets into the title track of the record. Request it in the comments if you like the music, I'll get the package I made of those recordings up somewhere if so desired.

SH076 - ...and even this shall pass away...

video: Haibane Renmei
music: Gamma Ray - "A While In Dreamland"
link: mediafire [45.5 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: June 2003

From another perspective, this one might be the video that made this into the Project (note capitalization) that it became; it's a pretty basic survey video on the series, but the idea came in after I already had the ideas for SH075 and SH078. It became readily apparent at that point that there were going to be more videos on this title than I'd ever done with another single source; to streamline the process, I was going to end up cutting for everything all at once, which meant all videos going in sequence, which accordingly meant, at least to my own sense, that they were going to have to hang together conceptually. Hence, Project, rather than four superficially related projects.

SH077 - Vivimus | Vivamus

video: Haibane Renmei
music: Gamma Ray - "Farewell"
link: mediafire [51.1 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: June 2003

If there's an argument that this Project overran its endpoints, this video is it. In the hard light of day this is a third-run idea (SH075 and SH078 the first-run, and SH076 the second run), too long for the relative lack of the material it's trying to base itself on, and in some ways here because the Project needed a fourth video to justify its own Project-ness. On the other hand, it's still a decent video (it wouldn't be getting republished if it wasn't), and the .org scores have it essentially within the margin of error relative to the first two videos in this Project. Bandwidth's cheap as long as you aren't reading this on your phone or something, dl it yourself and draw your own conclusions.

SH078 - on black canvas blacker stars...

video: Haibane Renmei
music: Borknagar - "The View of Everlast"
link: mediafire [45.2 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: June 2003

Like SH075, this was one of the founding ideas of this Project, and like that video, I really feel that it did hit its marks as intended, more than maybe the middle two videos did. There may be a correlation -- I definitely couldn't live with myself if I put out a Borknagar video that was underrealized or otherwise broken.

---

Putting this project together took most of two months. There was a lot of other stuff going on in my life at the time, but I recall being frustrated that I was already cutting before AniBo in April, and I wasn't editing until well into June. Of course, because the prework was all done, all the videos finished before the end of the month, but managing the huge source volume I was generating by cutting for four videos, while having said life stuff spinning furiously alongside, was extremely burdensome; it's likely a major factor why I haven't done something similar since.

More of a reason, likely, though, is that there hasn't been a source I've run across as solid as to allow four videos to be cut out of it. This project is a historical anomaly; since, as before, it's mostly been one video per video source, occasionally two, and recently I've been doing a better job of cutting second ideas that don't work as well off at the roots, in order to be sure that I'm spending my scarce edit time exclusively on good projects I want to finish. That was and is the rule -- four videos good enough to finish is and will remain the exception.

SH074 - kiitos (- o wa ri -)

2010-10-27T13:30:00.004-04:00

video: Rurouni Kenshin Seisouhen
music: Sentenced - "Aika Multaa Muistot (Everything Is Nothing)"
link: mediafire [45.2 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: April 2003

With this video, I completed three Sentenced videos with the three major artstyles of animated Rurouni Kenshin (first OVA style on SH029, TV/movie style on SH065, and then second OVA style here). I came pretty close to covering every property as well; I was kicking around an idea using the movie and "New Age Messiah", but that would have meant buying said movie and postponing other projects mostly in order to be able to make a weird and relatively meaningless claim, so that ended up falling by the wayside, and I remain "stuck" on 3/4.

SH073 - SCREAM BLOODY GORE

2010-10-27T13:10:00.004-04:00

video: Maryuu Senki
music: Possessed - "Death Metal"
link: mediafire [52.8 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: April 2003

The above picture is from a cut in the video that I'd named, in the production process, as 'goretex'. For fairly obvious reasons -- as shown, the dominant feature of the animation cut is a swirling vortex of gore, hence the portmanteau. And when you get something as ridiculously over-the-top, Dan-Seagrave-cover death metal as this, it tends to stick in your mind even seven and eight years later.

As alluded to on SH071, this is the culmination of a very bizarre sequence of videos. All three, at the time I entered them on the .org, represented the first use of both the anime and the musical artist in the video in the catalog. I don't know of anyone else who has a similar "triple-double"; even to pull this one off, I had to be fast with Colorful, find something interesting to do with the first couple eps of the skullcrushingly boring Piano, actually own a copy of this show, and then use racist music, a politically controversial band from the Ukraine, and then the last relatively-big thrash metal band that any otaku might be expected to pick up. I wasn't striving for it at the time, and it's not worth trying to do going forward; empty as well as nearly impossible, this is sort of an AMV anti-achievement.

SH072 - Darkness of Christ

2010-10-27T12:56:00.004-04:00

video: Piano
music: Nokturnal Mortum - "Barbarian Dreams"
link: mediafire [29 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: March 2003

This was done partly as a demo for Anime Boston '03 (I was, for the first and last time, on a panel, despite having very little to contribute) to show what could be done with some relatively simple effects design, but mostly because it could be turned around very quickly from weird idea into weird final video. The title is a Slayer reference that has absolutely nothing to do with the video beyond the source being colorized to dark purple on the pre end.

What I really should have done, for demo purposes, was to make the video, tracking the cuts, then go back and recut the source without the colorization, lay the same cuts in in the same order, and side-by-side the video streams to show how badly this would have come out without the effects in pre. Of course, I didn't, because I wasn't thinking as deeply about production processes at that point as I do now -- but that's not an excuse, because I had the example of SH020 right in my fucking catalog even at the time. I should have used that video if I wanted to say something about making edit decisions based on the color palette, but I didn't think of it, and the dislocation of doing something in a non-natural film color (SH023 and SH045 are grayscaled, and SH060 is sepiatoned, which are at least approximations of film behavior) was too strong a hook to ignore at the time. So it goes.

SH071 - say oi!

2010-10-27T11:19:00.007-04:00

video: Colorful
music: Skrewdriver - "Voice of Britain"
link: mediafire [26.5 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: March 2003

No link for the band here; I was uncertain even to publish it again at all. However, this video does exist, the music isn't even all that racist, the videography is done almost exclusively to blow that up, and if this one isn't included, the sequence from here to SH073 kind of breaks down. Just say O.K.

SH070 - ~

2010-10-27T10:50:00.004-04:00

video: Patlabor 2
music: KAWASHIMA Mirai - "Untitled 3"
link: mediafire [45.7 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: March 2003

This video is strongly a product of its time, originally idea-generated in early 2002 and finally assembled in early 2003. Anyone who doesn't get what this video is about, or is trying to get at (and amazingly, there have been several), either was not paying attention to current events in that time period, or just wasn't thinking critically about them.

I'm not going to ref Zeitgeist here, because that movie is dryer fluff for your brain. Watch The Power of Nightmares instead.

SH069 - i brought you fires

2010-10-19T16:55:00.003-04:00

video: SaiKano
music: Dark Tranquillity - "Hours Passed In Exile"
link: mediafire [48.1 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: February 2003

Almost everything in this video that can reasonably be described as "synch" is the result of accident and closure. A side effect of doing effects in post in the TMPEG->AVS/VDub->TMPEG chain that the source had to pass through for this is that frames occasionally got lost; there are a lot of effects in this video, and the resulting output got fucked up something fierce between effect and correction for such. I really didn't like it when I saw the first final builds, but I like it more now, mainly due to forgetting what the original edit decisions were supposed to look like. This isn't a great video, but it was important, at least for me, in pulling back the veil on what AMV really is.

The natural point of comparison for this video is SH054; similar vintage anime, songs off the same record. I like that one better, the .org prefers this one.

It would have been an easy source of lulz to keep the lid on and pretend this finished before SH068 in order to flip the catalog numbers, but that's not the way the actual production queue worked out. Honesty before all, even when it doesn't count, and is seen by exactly nobody.

SH068 - no taste at all

2010-10-19T16:49:00.003-04:00

video: Jungle de Ikou!
music: Ludacris - "Ho"
link: mediafire [29.4 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: February 2003

This is Youtube's favorite SH video. Seriously, people steal the fuck out of it over there. I wonder why.

SH067 - kiitos (stufe 1)

2010-10-19T16:37:00.003-04:00

video: Noir
music: Sentenced - "Kaamos"
link: mediafire [18.1 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: January 2003

This one is pretty ota-kusai; ginned up as a pretend trailer using stuff I got in a free disc in frickin Newtype. (Did not subscribe, just bought off the newsstand, but still.) It's also somewhat amateurish, as I found out about 30 seconds after the video finished that if you dropped a single fucking 0x20 space after the line of text you were placing in SSA, the top parts of the last letter on an italicized line wouldn't get mutilated like they are in the titles here. What the fuck, though, it's got Sentenced in it, and it's a nice little video.

SH066 - leave me cold

2010-10-19T16:22:00.004-04:00

video: Black Jack
music: Danzig - "Five Finger Crawl"
link: mediafire [37.1 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: January 2003

This video got into the inaugural Anime Boston contest. SH064 got into the overflow. That video is still better than this one, but hell, I'll take exposing people to Danzig and medical gore if I can't get Death and sheer brutality. There is a similar story involving SH112 and SH114 seven years later, though, which makes this one just that more odd.

SH065 - alone

2010-10-19T16:08:00.004-04:00

video: Rurouni Kenshin
music: Sentenced - "No One There"
link: mediafire [40.3 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: January 2003

The reason this looks clunky is a persistent problem that shows up in a lot of SH videos where stuff got sent through TMPEG at some point, which for some reason really stands out here. I'm guessing it's that MPEG is not an all-keyframes codec, so some information went missing at the clip junctions. The reason it looks weird, though, is that this is all cut out of the last episode of the TV series, which isn't related to any of the rest of the show in any especially direct fashion, and which the production company apparently decided to save money on by filling it with things other than animation.

SH064 - mardraum

2010-10-13T17:36:00.004-04:00

video: Jin-Roh
music: Death - "1000 Eyes"
link: mediafire [ MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: January 2003

This one isn't quite as strong as I thought it was going in, probably because the color balance is kind of fucked up, but I still believe really strongly in it. I had this idea for a while and had to keep pushing it off, mostly because my capture card was dead, so when I got it fixed up in December '02, it naturally came off the queue first, and it was important to me to get it done well. This is one of a very few videos/ideas where this is the case; fortunately, I executed this one pretty much to intended spec.

Not much I can say about this one; if it doesn't speak for itself, I'm not sure that I can ever really explain it.

SH063 - F. S. U.

2010-10-13T17:10:00.003-04:00

video: Super Gals
music: My Pet Demon - "Self Destruct"
link: mediafire [37.2 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: December 2002

This video wound up a chronological year in which I finished a total of 40 videos (SH024 through SH063, inclusive), and was NEET for a nontrivial portion of time. The twitch reaction is pretty simple: got nothing else to do, got nothing to do but make videos. The problem with this analysis is that the pace is pretty consistent regardless. From January through May, I was finishing up my last semester of undergrad, including writing a thesis in one subject and doing a substantial independent study in another. Despite that, SH024 through SH038 -- 15 videos, 5 months, 3 vpm. I was working from June through September -- 14 videos, 3.5 months, 4 vpm. The NEET stand from September through December resulted in SH053 through SH063; 11 videos in 3.5 months for about 3.15 vpm.

The figures are a little distorted because of the demos in the first two blocks, but each block is close enough to the full-year 3 1/3 vpm average for the deviation no not really make a difference. I obviously wasn't dumping all my time into AMV at the end of the year -- of course, since I was looking for work, prepping for and taking the GRE, then sending applications out -- at least not any more than I was while in school or working. The constant pace led me to think this sort of pace could run out indefinitely; grad school obviously was a lot more work, and then full-time field work was more challenging still. Now that I have a commute, the chance of getting back on this pace is pretty much nil.

SH062 - Now You're Gone

2010-10-13T16:02:00.005-04:00

video: One: True Stories
music: HammerFall - "Glory To The Brave" (video edit)
link: mediafire [57.9 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: December 2002

This video was done for a contest, otherwise I never would have picked it up. The video source is crap and the band is actively disliked. The cumulative effect is to hit the audience in the face, repeatedly, with a bat marked SRSLY, FUCK POWER BALLADS...or at least that was the intended effect. Actual results are mixed; some people seriously like this, though I have trouble seeing why.

This was not a cut-for-cut remake like SH108, but I was still guided by the band's official music video in the selection of shot types here. Some sections match up better than others, and some are painfully forced or just skipped, but I tried, with at least a moderate degree of success, to match in on most of the most hilariously cheesy bits.

SH061 - ormgard II: eng

2010-10-13T15:42:00.004-04:00

video: Witch Hunter Robin
music: Skyclad - "Land Of The Rising Slum"
link: mediafire [59.7 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: December 2002

Even in the remastered version, this song doesn't really sound that good; part of this is thematic -- you want a damaged, restricted, weak song for something like this -- and part of it is that this song as presented doesn't really exist.

I ordered Old Rope to try and get a better version of the song than the one I had off the antediluvian Skyclad site, which was already outdated-looking in 2000 and 2001, mostly because Prince of the Poverty Line was out of print, but unfortunately for purposes of this video, the electrified (normal) version is a lot more aggressive and pumping, which is about the opposite of what this video needs to be. Instead of a decent CD copy, I was left trying to hand-restore the crappy-bitrate mp3 that someone had capped off the Outrageous Fourtunes vinyl EP. I didn't have a turntable at that time, but that scarcely fucking mattered, since Skyclad only put out like 400 copies of the record in question, and in all likelihood around zero of them made it across the Atlantic.

A normal AMVer, one who is looking to say something about the video source by recomposing it to music, would cancel the video or at least look for a different soundtrack. As far as I was looking at it, this wasn't an option; changing out the song would result in a fundamentally different video, likely fundamentally opposed to the one I actually wanted to make, so it was go ahead with the marginally de-braindamaged version or nothing.

As noted back a ways, there was a Nevermore video (using "Next In Line") plotted as a followup to this that burned through the straw too fast and ended up getting cancelled. As not noted yet, I occasionally want to go back to this well with an Atoll Nerat song, but picking up DVD source keeps getting deprioritized relative to other stuff.

SH060 - The Man From Gomu-Gomu

2010-10-13T15:24:00.005-04:00

video: One Piece
music: Gamma Ray - "Lonesome Stranger"
link: mediafire [50.1 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar, SSMM
production date: November 2002

All the compositing in this video -- the lipsynch in the intro, and the flickering titles at the start -- was done manually with something called Slide Show Movie Maker, which accomplished with a difficult third-party utility what Adobe does natively with the Filmstrip thingy (at least as I've heard). The point was not to deliberately do things the hard way, just to demonstrate that even with the toolbox that I was restricted to in this environment, I wasn't absolutely precluded from doing stuff like this. It was probably more difficult than it needed to be, but it's still a good experience to get in the frame of mind where you're consciously thinking "what do I need to do in order to get from source sequence X to final sequence Y" rather than just "can I do most of what I want with transform Z". The stuff I did post-SH093 makes a strong case that a lot of these alleged lessons went out the window when I finally got ahold of an environment capable of doing more sophisticated effects, but they were still valuable at the time.

Sepiatoning the entire video (exclusive of the intro) was a production-style decision, but it had some knock-on effects in terms of workload. The source I had was in large measure rainbowed all to fuck, but knocking out the chroma channel and replacing it with one that was all brown had the effect of knocking out the rainbows, so I didn't need to do any special derainbowing. Those who have attempted to clean up, say, Pioneer's Trigun DVD print in Virtual Dub using Tim's smart derainbower know how much faster clipping can be if you don't need to have that filter in the chain, especially at the run-over-the-footage-with-a-truck levels necessary to get the rainbows out at that level of damage.

SH059 - hypersonicbitch

2010-10-12T15:12:00.003-04:00

video: Armitage III: Polymatrix
music: Pain - "Supersonic Bitch"
link: mediafire [37.2 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: November 2002

I soured on this video almost as soon as it was finished, and it now belongs in that elite group of videos that I can look back on and think "seriously, what the hell did I make that for?" In similar retrospect, though, it was good for me as an editor to not have a filter at this time, as I could explore the boundaries of what was good and smart to do in AMVs by actually going out and trying to apply this stuff to videos, rather than leaving it as a thought experiment. Sometimes things you think are dumb actually work, and sometimes things that look like good ideas in theory come out like garbage, and it can be difficult to make that determination a priori without having gone out and pushed the boundaries of your edit suite. This video is not actively bad, and I probably still watch it more than stuff like SH062, which is much better assembled, but if I had more of an ego or any pretensions at fame, I might be trying to bury this.

The fact that this is not buried and SH034 is really tells you something about how bad that former video is.

SH058 - One Way Down

2010-10-12T14:23:00.003-04:00

video: Animation Runner Kuromi
music: Iced Earth - "Highway To Hell"
link: mediafire [35.6 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: November 2002

This one is effectively SH037 with less blocking and more interlacing. The fact that I did this essentially twice -- rebranding/misapplying a classic metal song to the frenetic pace of Japanese media creation -- says, I think, more than anything I can rant about here about my own process. I was most productive as a coder, back when I was writing software rather than fixing it or discovering how people were fucking up using it, under deadline pressure and fueled with caffeine and speed metal. If amphetamines were legal, safer, and didn't make your teeth fall out, they probably would have been in the mix as well. So it's not surprising that when AMV production goes under the gun, I subconsciously want to crank Tales From The Twilight World and Burnt Offerings -- and since I'm jamming the song and related material continuously while cutting, to keep myself located in the feel, that projects that synergize with that concept dominate my output.

When I need to get shit done, the soundtrack is screaming guitars and double-kick pedals driven through the floor. Is it any wonder that when I make a video from source about getting shit done, the records that pop off the stack follow the same pattern? See, even Iced Earth covering AC/DC can have psychological implications.

It also needs to be mentioned on this video that the title is skelped from cool former North Shore band One Way Down, who are sadly not active any more.

SH057 - Bijected Cosmic Face

2010-10-12T14:00:00.004-04:00

video: Cowboy Bebop - Knockin' On Heaven's Door
music: Death - "Secret Face" and "Cosmic Sea" (remixed samples)
link: mediafire [24.5 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: October 2002

This is the kind of video that you make not just as an AMVer with a lot of disposable time, but as an AMVer with a lot of disposable time who also happens to be a musician. I wrote a lot when I was starting out about being just a "bass player with a capture card", but that musical training was not used for a whole lot outside of this video.

If I don't know what an arpeggio is, I don't have enough material to make this video. It's that simple. Without that knowledge, I can cut the cool solo sections from both of the songs listed, but I don't have enough information to realize that the composed sample can be reversed and added on at the end of itself while still sounding cool. Some progressions work one way and not another; arpeggios are inherently reversible, which is what makes the backwards-recorded section in the second half of the video work.

Even if you don't like the images or the composition in the video track, this is still one to pick up. Chuck and Steve's solo work as isolated here is fucking classic, and I ended up preserving a lot more of the original tone through the HQ build and later remaster than I (with my shitty speakers of the time) thought I had -- and that's before the largely-unexpected coolness of the reversed part comes in.

SH056 - LinkinBread K

2010-10-12T13:40:00.006-04:00

video: Kogepan (plus other crap in the intro)
music: Linkin Park - "Cure For The Itch"
link: mediafire [31.5 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: October 2002

This is the SH video that comes closest, even now, to what normal people might define as a mash-up or pure Video Art. As such, it's desperately out of character, but it's a reminder at least to myself that even with the incredibly blunt instruments I had at my disposal at the time, I could still do something like this. I'm pretty sure that I didn't have any illusions about editing professionally even before this one -- I was having a hard enough time finding someone to pay me for what I was actually trained and qualified to do -- but despite liking the process and the end product, this video really cemented that I wasn't going to be running about with a video potato masher in the future, looking for disparate things to smash together. The only even indirect successor of this video is SH096, and only for the extensive audio and video editing on both sides -- and that one's a hell of a lot more "in character" than this.

As noted, there are a bunch of other sources used in the intro, which are documented in the end card. End card or no end card, I can't give doki enough credit, hence the link in the actual writeup.

There is an Animax logo in the video that is not attested to in the pic above. This is because it looks like garbage, and I can remove logos in still frames, but could not in my editing environment when this video was put out. Actually, I still can't even now, and I view this as a good thing, because it keeps me motivated to buy stuff I want to work with when it comes out commercially.

SH055 - d e f y

2010-10-12T13:22:00.004-04:00

video: Samurai Deeper Kyo
music: Dimension Zero - "Your Darkest Hour"
link: mediafire [41.2 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: September 2002

Like a lot of the other videos produced in fall 2002, when I had pretty arbitrary amounts of time to work on AMVs -- GRE prep only took so much time, and as hard as I looked, nobody was hiring -- this one was more or less eat-what-you-kill: ideas could come in and get turned around into finished videos with very low latency, so the filter on what did get made wasn't super-stringent. This meant that I had the freedom to play around with stuff and produce something like SH056, the bandwidth to do a very pure and conceptually simple video like this, and unfortunately no convincing counterargument to stand in the way of making SH059. The main driver of this was the .org-driven prescription of video fidelity as an active goal, in concert with the fact that my capture card was still broken. I was limited in what sources I had available, and as I got new high-quality material in, that was rapidly bound in to new ideas and ground out. No matter what, I couldn't stand still, and even the videos I'm not super fond of from that era had their purpose.

SH054 - me[tamor]phitic

2010-10-08T18:07:00.003-04:00

video: RahXephon
music: Dark Tranquillity - "Cathode Ray Sunshine"
link: mediafire [42.2 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: September 2002

Though it involved 30+ hours of production time, this was another relatively "snap" idea, also coming out of MITAC, indirectly; I hadn't been very impressed with the show seeing it as club, but listening through the Damage Done record for the first time, this song immediately jumped out as needing to be videographed with this source. A lot of the hits in this video, especially the ones that actually work, were done mentally while listening to the CD, in the process of forming the idea. This is actually how most ideas get put together; the exceptional case, like the Polterchrist song I had kicking around in my head while watching Good Witch of the West that hasn't actually become a video yet, goes in the other direction. This is how I get at declaring myself music-first; every idea turns into a combination somewhere, but most SH videos take the form of presenting X music using Y anime, rather than using music Y to say something about anime X.

SH053 - tomaranai

2010-10-08T17:55:00.004-04:00

video: Sugar, A Little Snow Fairy
music: Doushin - "Take On Your Will" (OP)
link: mediafire [26.5 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: September 2002

This was the first video I cut source in VDub for, acting as a test-bed, fortuitously, for the more serious SH054 which was coming up. I had the first disc of Sugar out from MITAC for some reason, I got ahold of the OP off distribution or something, and hey presto, synthesis. It wasn't intentionally a shakedown project, but it somewhat turned out as one, and if you have zero expectations, it's a decent little video.

As appears to be usual, this makeweight shakedown video is about 1/3 stars better, on average, according to the .org, than SH054. Lulz.

SH052 - Another Fine Reason

2010-10-08T17:33:00.005-04:00

video: Onegai Teacher
music: Gamma Ray - "Heaven Can Wait" (Blast From The Past re-recording)
link: mediafire [45.1 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: September 2002

I entered into the brave new world of NEET around the time I was making this video. This does not in itself explain why I thought the bit with the car was a good idea. This is a decent video all told, and it marks the end of one micro-era and the start of another with regard to production style, but it still carries the problems of SH046 with regard to the fact that I was trying to do effects work with a video Hole Hawg. Doing effects, as opposed to general production design, would have to wait until I got an editing environment in which they weren't such a blunt damn instrument.

For illustration purposes, this is "the bit with the car", an unnecessarily complex MEIMI effect that almost works in the context of the video.

This effect would show up again in SH082/83, but in that context it's being intentionally excessive.

This was also the video that got the quick-comment that launched the remasters project.

SH051 - dead worlds

2010-10-08T17:13:00.004-04:00

video: Hoshi no Koe
music: Nevermore - "Dead Heart In A Dead World" (intro)
link: mediafire [16.7 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: September 2002

One depressive Nevermore video follows another due to fast action; I saw the anime for this at MITAC a week or so earlier, borrowed the disc in question from the club library, and set the process up ASAP. With a short musical selection (being, mostly, the riff that Jim wrote on his four-track at some point to set up the song, which ended up being constructed in as an intro), I could make this work by hiding the MPEG2 render behind the wall of sleep (i.e., run it overnight and pick up clipping when I got home from work the next day), but it was still suboptimal as a process.

Despite the fact that a lot of SH videos have a life cycle of months to years, going into the production queue, getting vetted, and going into production after the videos ahead of them finish or get cancelled, I like normal AMVers do work on a scratch-the-itch basis, and if a good idea comes in, it should be turned around into a video as soon as practical. This was the impetus behind this video, and it's also the impetus behind a lot of what I do to speed up my process and reduce time committed. If the latency between start of work and finished idea is reduced, projects get done faster, and spur-of-the-moment projects can get picked up and finished without overly delaying long-scheduled stuff.

If the images on this one and SH050 suck less than the older posts, this means the remaster worked. Older images were done for the antediluvian SH website in like 2005, based on the old versions; these are screencaps from the current versions of the videos in question scaled at 60%.

SH050 - drowning pool

2010-10-08T16:59:00.006-04:00

video: Ai Yori Aoshi
music: Nevermore - "Dreaming Neon Black"
link: mediafire [54.1 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: August 2002

This video was made from a really limited source pool, which shows in the way it's composed; if I recall correctly, four episodes, of which one was unsubbed. Add in to the fact that it's cutting against the grain of the show, and it's not surprising that this one had to get edited down.

Looking back, the constraints that I've been mentioning for the last few posts look clearer and clearer in retrospect: SH048, 049, and 051 are one-episode cuts, effectively, and this one was a minimal 4-ep. Despite this, I was still dumping a lot of time into TMPEG, time that I had less and less of as I cycled up into jobsearch mode. It was no coincidence that doing a deep 13-episode cut for SH052 on top of the effectively wasted render time broke the camel's back.

INSO17: Convoy da ze

2010-10-08T08:47:00.004-04:00

video: Great Teacher Onizuka
music: C.W. McCall - "Convoy" (sample)
link: mediafire [1.8 MB]
editor: Magix 2.0+ deLuxe
production date: October 2010

I'm currently working on a punk rock GTO video, but in the process of cutting the VOBs for the first disc last night, I ran across the main sequence in this video, which is pretty much presented in order except for the typically-SH/INSO negative-space drop and the pseudo-lipsynch drop-in, and seriously, whenever you get 18-wheelers flying through the air, you need to either pick up "Convoy" or rummage through your Jerry Reed collection. Crashing through the tollbooths, though, is "Convoy" all the way......and anyone who hasn't dreamed of doing this IRL has obviously never driven in New Jersey.

If I'd done this two months earlier, it might have gotten into Hell 5, but I'm not going to sit on this thing for months and months waiting for Hell 6 to maybe drop, maybe never drop. Hence like INSO09 it gets published here rather than depending on someone else's package.

SH049 - Prelude to Apocalypse

2010-10-01T16:47:00.004-04:00

video: Blood: The Last Vampire
music: Iced Earth - "Damien" (intro)
link: mediafire [15.2 MB]
editor: VirtualDub
production date: September 2002

This is still the only video that I've done in VirtualDub. The 9 hours spent in the editor to do a minute and a half of video is probably the most significant contributing factor to this. It's important to learn that just because you can do something doesn't mean you necessarily should; while this was a good proof-of-concept, the adaptive course for doing AMV is not to stick it out in Virtual Dub, but rather to do what I ended up doing two years later and buy a copy of a very good (if fatally flawed, there's a lot of Magix bitching in the versions of these entries out past SH093) non-linear editing environment for $12. This (well, and warez) is how AMV really comes to the masses: not Free tools but good-enough-cheap-enough proprietary tools with lower cost of access. Life is a clay urn on the mantle.

When I got around to doing the remaster, however, I had to remaster it like anything else -- from the TMPEG-built MPEG2. At the time this was done, I didn't have a DVD burner (very few people did, so I wasn't as far behind the curve on this as on many other aspects of AMV technology), so I wasn't really able to archive the original AVI version out of VDub. (Which I think was in HuffYUV, but maybe not, maybe just uncompressed; no way to tell now.) This at least was forced; the idiot decision to render a lot of the stuff between SH093 and SH106 or so as MPEG2 out of Magix was just pure boneheadedness from working in a boneheaded, MPEG2-dependent environment for so long.

SH048 - You Tonight

2010-10-01T16:26:00.006-04:00

video: Moonlight Lady
music: The Dreamside - "Mirror Moon"
link: mediafire [45.2 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: August 2002

This was the third (and so far, last) SH video built exclusively out of H source -- not the fourth, I had the original North American release of Kite for SH012 -- and the only one that bare tits ended up in. So yes, caution and this is FSK16, but if you haven't seen much more than this by age 16 in this depraved modern world, you a) don't have the internet and b) aren't trying too hard.

More relevant is that this is the first video I was able to use MEIMI effects in; similar bizarre video transforms would show up most notably in SH052, SH066, and SH083. I'm not even sure that this program can run under my current system.

This was also, I think, the trigger to start cutting stuff in VDub, since I was doing cleanup there before feeding the video out anyway. That led immediately to SH049, which got things a little more concrete.

SH047 - show us your grace

2010-10-01T16:14:00.005-04:00

video: Kanon (original, not the 2006 remake produced due to epic amounts of nerdrage)
music: Old Man's Child - "The Millennium King" (sample)
link: mediafire [22.6 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: August 2002

Selective sample size theater: of the six videos in the extent SH046 - SH051, four are built on samples rather than entire songs. SH046 is a bunch of repeated riff sections, this is one of the best black metal solos ever written followed by one of the genre's best lock-in breaks, SH049 is an intro with some minor manipulation, and SH051 is another intro that more or less stands on its own, independent of the rest of the song. This may be a subconscious side effect of the dissatisfaction with the process that was developing and working itself out at the time; if I was wasting X nights and days prepping video source, I might have wanted to get the actual editing out of the way quicklike.

This video includes an unmodified four-cut sequence originally used in SH042, which was the seed of the video. It was also the first SH video publicly hosted, on a FTP that was up for like five minutes in August or September 2002.

SH046 - Try Again

2010-10-01T15:56:00.003-04:00

video: Azumanga Daioh
music: Sinergy - "Gallowmere" (remix)
link: mediafire [29.5 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: August 2002

I had done audio manipulation previously, most recently in BAS17, but this was the first video where I was actively chopping and cutting, stretching and pulling, in order to develop as much a sound as a visual collage. It was around this time that I was recording the only Coelem material that's actually been released, which was my first experience with actual production and post-production, audio-wise; the earlier Coelem demos (Vexilla regis prodeunt infernii (2000), and Tendrils of Burnt Flesh Ensnare the Feeble-Willed (recorded 2001, never actually released)) were just recorded, the technology not really allowing me to do anything except make sure that the take was good, then dump that one to tape from the master. For Tenebral Presence, I was recording not only digitally, but in a digital context that I could do something useful with in post....which I did, resulting in the B side to the single and in the audio setup for this video.

I may still have the interstitials that were supposed to go between the "takes", but I'm not sure if I kept them or not. Either way, I didn't decide to put them together when I did the remaster, and this video is thus going to probably remain non-fully-reassembled-as desired -- the version that it's been existing in for the last 8+ years is good enough.

SH045 - Dawn of the Dead

2010-10-01T15:14:00.004-04:00

video: Hellsing, Bible Black
music: Death - "Zombie Ritual"
link: mediafire [44.2 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: July 2002

Due to the production chain of grayscaling, then TMPEG-rendering full episodes, this was the video that really broke the camel's back and led to the investigation that produced the change in production management that was documented here. SH047 was another one that was bad in this regard, but this is where I started getting sick of the 13-hour renders.

This was the first Death video that I did, but that's not the reason that this video got a ridiculous number of .org hits in its first, say, five years available. The reason for that is that for a lot of that time, this was the "other" video in the .org database using Bible Black. (The video, of course, being this one.) If getting bycaught exposes people to early Death who'd never hear Chuck's music otherwise, throw me in the fucking gillnet.

SH044 - The Long Uphill

2010-10-01T14:54:00.004-04:00

video: Hajime no Ippo
music: Game Over - "Little Mac's Confession"
link: mediafire [44.2 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: July 2002

If this looks older than it is, it's because the video fidelity is such crap, and there wasn't a whole lot I could do about it in the remastering process. This came at a particularly bad time for such; I was getting acculturated to the .org at this time and really learning to hate logos where I gritted my teeth and put up with them before. This is the last video where this is a real problem; on SH045 I was cutting around logos just as with subs, and in SH051 and SH056 the logo isn't especially obtrusive.

Nevertheless, this video has logo problems, and it has problems with macroblocking because the sources were poorly encoded and the DVD release didn't start for like a year after I did the video. However, I still watch it occasionally, because there's a lot of footage in this one that doesn't have those problems, and it's still a pretty decent video underneath.

SH043 - D I S A R M

2010-10-01T14:20:00.004-04:00

video: Full Metal Panic
music: In Flames - "Goliaths Disarm Their Davids"
link: mediafire [49.1 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: July 2002

This is the only SH video ever to officially win at anything but being bad. (Obviously, INSO10, 11, and 12 won at being bad and got into the Graveyard for it, but that's not the same as trying to be good in a judged contest.) The caption in question was Best Action at the 2002 iteration of CNAnime, probably due to a weak field at a young con and a new source in equal parts, but a win is a win, particularly when it punches your ticket for certain contests that at the time (and maybe even still) require you to have won a recognized award in order to compete.

Not that any award ever arrived, but hey, it's a different country and it's a good thing to keep from being/becoming award-focused. My trophies are of different kinds, and mostly can be sewn into a jacket.

SH007 - blood to sand

2010-10-01T13:58:00.003-04:00

video: Perfect Blue
music: Nevermore - "Narcosynthesis"
link: mediafire [49.8 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: June 2001

I held this back when I initially got to it (should have gone in between SH006 and SH009) because at that time I still thought I was going to remake the video. However, that turned out not to be possible for several reasons, some technical and some artistic.

The technical reasons are actually more difficult to explain for once. As it turns out, I for whatever excessively stupid reason ended up deleting the clips that were used in the video before saving the source archive. This meant that while I had a cutlist of mark-in points that corresponded to clips in the source pool, it was the markpoints that didn't correspond to existing cuts in the archive that I had that I had to pay attention to. This made source-gathering a ridiculous chore, since I had not only to translate from the VHS-cap-section timing to the ripped-VOB timing, but grout through the source for stuff that I knew should be there but wasn't, but this may have been a blessing in disguise, because it made the artistic issue all the clearer.

This is a decent video for what it is, the seventh SH video, cut out of a bad print and around subs, and assembled linearly. The problem is that its shortcomings are such and in such dimensions that if I were to remake it, the changes needed to accommodate the new cuts would be enough to change the conceptual thrust of the video. SH007/116 would have come out closer to 116, and I had very little desire to do this song/source combo again, nine years later, under the same retarded cutting constraints as the original. This is why the remake didn't get done: under the constraints of the project, it went from something I wanted to do to something I didn't want to do, and if you want a bright line in AMVing, that's as good as any. Nobody is paying you to do this. Do exclusively the things you want to do, and categorically refuse to work on projects you don't actually want to work on.

SH042 - burn the candle at both ends

2010-06-08T16:59:00.003-04:00

video: various
music: Sentenced - "Neverlasting"
link: mediafire [36.3 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: June 2002

Like SH024, this video was done as a kind of afterthought to balance the demo it appeared in, but in this case the balance was going the other way. Also like SH024, this one uses a Sentenced song that starts with the letter "N", which occasionally makes it confusing for me looking over my private AMV archive -- in which I ditch titles as being unproductive and pretentious in favor of the formula band_name+anime_source-song_title. These two videos both start with the string "Sentenced+various-Ne", and it takes an extra half-second to make sure I'm pulling in the right one.

SH041 - hold your head high

2010-06-08T16:04:00.003-04:00

video: various
music: Pain - "On And On"
link: mediafire [39.2 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: June 2002

In earlier notes, this one was flagged as being not metal, or at least sufficiently non-metal to qualify it as a 'dance' video, which I have pretty much not done since. Then Pain goes and gets a sub-1000 page number on metal-archives. I don't know whether this is irony or just another "lol metal-archives" moment.

This was supposed to be the last new video in demo 3, but it turned out not to be. The 28-second cut from which the preview image is lifted is still the longest sequence used unaltered in a SH video.

SH040 - blind to see

2010-06-08T15:29:00.008-04:00

video: various
music: Iron Maiden - "Can I Play With Madness?"
link: mediafire [35.3 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: June 2002

There's a fair amount of guff in the .org entry for this video about it being broken, and coming out in weird versions, etc., so this is probably the right place to discuss why.

The reason is that MovieStar, while a decent linear editor, was piss-poor at exporting stuff. This is the reason for the very small and very weird frame sizes on the original (non-remastered) versions of SH videos before SH093; well, that and that I didn't entirely know wtf to do with a MPEG2 output. What I should have done was process the final HQ build of the video like a DVD stream (that I didn't have any experience working with yet, but what the hell): drop into DGIndex (or whatever the equivalent was back then), save project, import AviSynth script into VDub, build standards-compliant full-screen two-pass XVID encode like a civilized person.

What I actually did was quite different, though close enough to make any overly neurotic video quality types want to bash me to hell and back with a brick: I exported from MovieStar as a "high quality" .asf (whatever that meant), then brought that into a legacy version of Virtual Dub that had ASF support, which was removed before I started making AMVs even. (In this video, the ASF didn't and wasn't able to export right, cutting the production chain off at the knees.) This was the source for a 3000 Kbps DivX distribution copy with, necessarily, damaged audio, but my speakers were damaged as well, so my ability to hear that the audio was fucked was kind of impaired.

This is the sort of thing that keeps guide authors awake at night: a theoretically smart process that doesn't even know how brain-dead it's being, or how few changes would be required to make it truly intelligent. I obviously had the high-quality MPEG2 builds; that's what all these remasters were done out of. I also had and was able to use AviSynth, at least after I started cutting stuff in Virtual Dub in the fall of 2002; I just didn't put it together for whatever reason. Stuff like this keeps me on my toes process wise: always conscious of needing to be aware of what I may be missing, and what I'm not seeing that I ought to.

SH039 - kimi no tameni

2010-06-08T14:56:00.006-04:00

video: various
music: SHIMOKAWA Mikuni - "Tomorrow"
link: mediafire [36.3 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: June 2002

It's somewhat fitting, in the same ironic sense that anything at all is fitting for Shin Hats, that the only multi-part demo that is really accessible, and primed to attract anime-fan demographics, is the last one, and the one that I had no control over getting actually shown, since I mailed it up to my former kouhai in BAS (page hasn't been updated in forever, the club's still alive though) midway through the summer rather than lamely driving up and participating post-graduation.

This video is the first unambiguously non-metal song to go into a SH demo (yes, Linkin Park and Adema require some unholy twisting to get to that point, but you know people are going to fight that corner), and the first, period, not in English, though by this point I'd already done videos with bands from Finland, Sweden, Norway, Germany, and Russia. Despite weird historical accidents like three videos done in German and only one (the shortest) in English between SH107 and SH111, this is actually the norm. It's a lot more common for English speakers to not understand the lyrics in a SH video because of the vocal style than because of the language used.

SH038 - way up high

2010-06-08T14:24:00.006-04:00

video: On Your Mark
music: Skyclad - "Dreamer Deceiver" (cover)
link: mediafire (remaster) [36.9 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar (remastered Magix 2.0+ deLuxe)
production date: May 2002 (remastered October 2009)

The picture up above does not represent the full fidelity of this video as it currently exists. This is because the pictures for these entries through about like SH089 were all done back in 2003/2004 when I was first putting together a SH web presence at UofM, and as noted above, I rebuilt this video shot for shot from non-beat-up source in October 2009.

A DVD print of the On Your Mark video was included, quite unexpectedly, at the back of the version of Umi ga Kikoeru (ok, ok, I Can Hear The Sea) that I picked up at the grocery store when I was in Beijing back in May 2006; however, due to not being able to read Chinese, I missed it until I ripped that DVD for use in assembling SH111 in January 2009. That video got hopelessly delayed for various reasons, but after eight months of mostly-not work, I had the opportunity to do this remaster as a follow-up project, made possible because I'd been inactively looking for the song on CD (or suitable fascimile) over a lot of that time, and it eventually paid off. The jump from upscaled-Indeo-from-LD to DVD video source is almost equalled by the jump from watery-room-mic to proper-CD-rip in the audio....and when this initially came out on the .org last October, it was replacing a 320x240 Divx encode that looked like the picture above. Video salinity shock, pur.

This is the second of two SH videos rebuilt; SH005 got redone as SH097, while this one obviously didn't get a new number. I'm currently working on a rebuild of SH007, which looks like it'll more likely get the SH116 designation rather than slotting in over the old version.

SH037 - gambarimasho!!

2010-06-07T16:07:00.003-04:00

video: Comic Party
music: Iron Maiden - "The Wicker Man"
link: mediafire [46.1 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: May 2002

Like SH035, the song here was originally booked with this source before getting pulled back into demo 2. In this case, though, it's easier to argue for direct improvement, because the thematic of getting back on track and standing on one's own feet plays into the source available from this title a little better than with the diverse bucket available on the demo. Of course, in discussions I've had about this video since, this perspective isn't universal; it seems to be restricted somewhat to people who first heard the song in its original historical context, as the first indication that Iron Maiden was going to be relevant again as a result of Bruce coming back, rather than just a museum piece. Without this context, the theme of "rising to the challenge" isn't as prominent, but if I do my job properly in the video, I can convey that perspective to the audience regardless of where they're coming from historically.

SH036 - Trip At The Brain

2010-06-07T15:52:00.003-04:00

video: Cowboy Bebop
audio: Fishbone - "Post Cold War Politics"
link: mediafire [10.8 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: April 2002

I like this video. The .org hates it. I can't say that I don't occasionally see the point of view that gets this marked with the lowest score of any locally-available video, because this is relentlessly weird, and for a long time the print on the available copy of the video looked like absolute crap. Thanks to the remasters project, the print now just looks mostly like crap, but the video is still relentlessly out in left field, so scores aren't going to improve.

SH035 - break me down

2010-06-07T15:41:00.004-04:00

video: Yumede Aetara
music: Adema - "Giving In"
link: mediafire [39.3 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: March 2002

This is the same song that was used in SH027, but this was the video it was originally assigned to. This was an idea down near the bottom of the to-do list at the time, but it got pulled up as a result of the capturecardpocalypse mentioned earlier. Depending on perspective, it can be a good thing to do neat little videos like this one that don't have much in the way of ambition; at this point, it was kind of a force due to a lack of other ideas. Between SH033 and demo 3, there's a fair amount that can be contested on the logic of "well, maybe not making AMVs would have been an acceptable option", but I didn't see it that way at the time, and these videos turned out getting made.

Nani Naze Causality

2010-06-07T08:23:00.003-04:00

The What and Why of Causality (SH115)

---

By now, I feel that enough space has been given for people to form their own opinions about this video, so I can weigh in without my comments being taken as authoritative about what it is, or what it's trying to do. This was also intentional: this is a self-organizing video, and I wanted for it to at least try, initially, to be self-documenting.

The what, first: this is a video that was to a large degree edited by random rolls (hence the credit to The Machine That Won The War). What I did was roll on a table of all the non-credit cuts in Summer Wars, and place the resulting cut into the timeline until I felt the music changed enough to justify another cut, or until I ran out of frames. Effects are by design rather than random, and at the end of the song I had a separate pool of extremely long cuts to be used as scaffolding that I rolled 1d20 on to place, except for the last two, which were by intent. There are zero frames in this not from the original source; I (mostly) put away my usual tools of negative space, positive space, and trigger abuse in order to concentrate on excessive close cutting to compose an order out of the chaos presented by the literally random clip selection.

The why: This was a confluence of several themes that turned into a video idea. I wanted to do a literally random video (picking cuts with rand(1) or something similar and letting the chips fall where they may) for a while. Since the source collection would be by linearly decomposing the input into its component cuts, it would have to be from movie source, for linearity (because I'm lazy) and to keep the total size of the source pool down. Also, since any cut could come in at any time, I had to avoid the slack or barren animation that you occasionally get in TV anime.

I was looking at The Girl Who Leapt Through Time as a potential source, but that was getting an overused rap on the .org, so I was leaning away from it; I needed a source that was visually striking to work with the assembly method, but I didn't want something where every cut has been seen in a hundred videos before, because that would tip the random-recombination element too strongly. It was in this time that I encountered Summer Wars, having heard a lot of good stuff about it when it was in theaters, and was immediately sold. I ended up not even buying the other movie.

The musical choice was another strong driver; I wanted to do an Arctopus video, but didn't want to kill myself in the process. Random selection takes a lot of the pain out of finding the exact cut, in a pool of nearly 1400, to match to the quarter-second of one of Colin Marston's fills. Additionally, despite being completely unrelated, there was a huge fucking kickup about someone who did a video to the whole of BTBAM's Colors record (which, really, is not good enough to get such treatment, especially in contrast to their earlier albums) and wouldn't acknowledge its weaknesses. I get embarrassed and defensive about such things, and it's not honest to claim that there wasn't at least a little motivation, as long as I was on this project, to show that you can do ambitious projects with long runtimes, absurdly technical music, and challenging concepts and not have it come out like crap.

As things developed, the synergy of the source with the concept drove the project further. The central idea behind the video is mass parallelism, and the implications that has for causality (hence the title). If everything is happening at once -- as manifested by the blizzard of random-selected intercutting -- what prior event is what consequence connected to? Is it possible to pick that out? This is kind of a big theme in the first half of the movie; a case of mistaken identity caused by a scattergun social-engineering attack, with its aim parallelized cracking. The ideas of parallelism, distributed resources and the communication models that bind them together, and the complementarity of social and technological approaches to the challenges of the modern world are, of course, everywhere in the movie, and it's difficult to think of a video that would bring them together into some kind of coherent whole that did NOT come out looking like this one. (Well, fucking duh, this was the Summer Wars video that I did, and if I was capable of looking at the material in a radically different way, I wouldn't've come up with the idea.) This might be why, at the halfway point in the production when I checked, there were exactly zero full Summer Wars videos out.

The random-select concept made the video easier but this is not the same as easy. Not by a fucking long shot. I still had to do all the actual intercutting to make things work, in addition to the rolling, and I also had to spend nearly 15 hours cutting up the movie in the first place, then moving it to an environment where I could keep 100 minutes of HD source on-disk rather than on remote storage. While the base idea of decomposing limited source into its component elements and recombining those in time with the music echoes back to an earlier day, actually doing so was a significant challenge even for me as an experienced editor.

The only regret that I have was that I didn't do this all in AviSynth, or that there wasn't a transparent way to do that. Why? Because I could have distributed a master script calling a synthesis of 500 or so smaller scripts (plus of course the index, omg bootleg), it would be a lot smaller in footprint, and I could claim to have out the first interpreted rather than compiled AMV. As a once-and-maybe-future Lisp head, this would have been neat, but in the larger scope of things is really not that important, and nobody would have the processing power required to interpret a video like this with any kind of smooth playback at the time it was released.

SH033 - Phantom on the Green

2010-06-03T16:33:00.006-04:00

video: Boogiepop Phantom
music: Demons & Wizards - "Fiddler on the Green"
link: mediafire [60.4 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: February 2002

In February 2002, war was beg--, no, strike that, PortCon Maine was in its first year and BAS was considering a trip down that ultimately did not come together. Related to that, I put together this video as an entry for the AMV contest, but did not end up submitting. They may have only been accepting entries on VHS at that point, and I was insufficiently aware, at least at that point, of the ins and outs of making VCDs and SVCDs to get around the capture card/output problem.

This is the last SH video not made from digisubs/other people's encodes until SH064. Because the video that eventually became SH070 was the one that was planned for SH035, after wrapping SH034 (not going to be posted) I attempted to install a trial of Adobe Premiere to see how that would work, since I was already feeling the limitations of the editing environment that I had available. The result was disastrous. I was able to recover the computer, but the capture card was proper fucked, and would stay that way for most of the rest of the year. This led to the Verbot on Adobe products and a period of grasping at straws, source-wise, that eventually forced me to learn more about digital video again. It also made SH070 a much better video, when I got back to it, than it would have been as SH035. So there was an upside, but try telling that to someone who thinks he's lost his production environment, and is going to have a giant hole blown in his project schedule, not to mention a wallet 300 dollars lighter from buying another card that ultimately didn't fix the problem.

This was also the first SH video, at least as far as I've been made aware of, to get jacked on YouTube. I'd post the link, but it got removed sometime between 2004? 2005? iirc and the present. Other people really need to do a better job of spreading around the videos I make to evangelize bands in order to prop up their internet egos.

SH032 - e vol ve

2010-06-03T16:16:00.003-04:00

video: Boys Be
music: Solar Signs - "Skyland"
link: mediafire [38.6 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: February 2002

This video is probably the single most unambiguous success of the founding principle of Shin Hatsubai: to introduce new or obscure music to anime audiences that will like it. The band is a beyond-kvlt Russian post-black-metal ensemble that I found on a Japanese site dedicated to Russian metal; the anime, bugged digisubs that could not kill the attraction of the music in combination with the visuals. (You can see the digisubber watermark in the upper right corner of the preview pic above.) If a) I can be arsed and b) I can find DVD source of the first 6 episodes of Boys Be, this video may at some future point get remastered to get rid of the bug.

For both those who are here looking for Solar Signs' demo, and those who just came for the AMV but decided DO WANT, it's available on request (i.e., I still have everything from Wait Me At Dusk except "Theory of Hopelessness", and will upload a package if someone actually asks.)

SH031 - Revolt

2010-06-03T15:27:00.004-04:00

video: Fushigi Yuugi OVA
music: Gamma Ray - "Rebellion In Dreamland" (2000 re-recorded version)
link: mediafire [96.4 MB] (it's nine fricking minutes long, gies a break)
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: January 2002

This was and is the longest single AMV that I've done. If you count SH075 through SH078 as four parts to a single whole, then yes, that checks in at like 18 minutes, but that's not how I edited those videos. And yes, this was blasted out in the space of less than a week, because I'd already capped the footage in advance. Even that, though, as previously noted, speaks to the constraints of working with essentially a linear editor (if all you've got is a hammer, you're not going to waste time trying to plane the boards smooth with it), but much more to the realities of being a last-semester senior, doing only three classes, of which only one (the others being finishing writing a thesis for German and implementing an independent-study project for CS) actually involved going onto campus. I spent a lot of time in the library and in the lab, but outside of work four nights a week, band/orchestra on the other three, and a once-weekly midnight radio show, I had virtually no ironclad commitments to break up AMV work. If I wanted to do a six-hour stand in the middle of the day, to finish an edit, I could usually do that, and do whatever got preempted while the final video was building, or at night until some arbitrary hour after band/work, unless I had a turn-in milestone to meet. That's just not possible post-graduation in a situation where I have a commute, a regular 8-hour shift, and for most of that time, at least an occasional phone tether that may require attention.

This video has always been historically big. It was originally distributed in a 320x240 screensize that due to bad protocols and other crap, was barely less than 100 MB, no matter how I shook and banged on it. The remasters project let me get it up to the original master resolution but, again, at nearly 100 MB. If I had a better print and 24 fps footage rather than 30, it would be smaller, but I'm not going to waste time finding the DVDs to remaster this for that reason.

SH030 - BLOOD REIGN

2010-06-02T14:58:00.005-04:00

video: Mystery of the Necronomicon
music: Hypocrisy - "Carved Up"
link: mediafire [38.9 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: January 2002

By this time, it had been three months and eight videos since I'd done something FUCKING METAL. This was and remains too long for active operations. It's also a testament to what working conditions were like back then; I could get back to school, cap two hours of video, cut it down to strict brutality, avoiding the porn parts, then pound out a draft and a finished version and be done in about 12 hours worked, before classes started again. Nowadays, I seldom have 12 hours over two days to devote to AMVage, let alone the initiative to do so, but part of that is also that standards change. Cutting takes longer in VDub than it did in MovieStar, and the ability to fine-tune cut length and apply effects forces that work to actually be done, to make sure that the video's coming out optimal. Back in MovieStar, if I missed a hit, I missed a fucking hit, or just edited the sequence differently; not too fucking much that could be done about it.

SH029 - Harvest of Thorns

2010-06-02T14:43:00.003-04:00

video: Rurouni Kenshin OVA
music: Sentenced - "Killing Me Killing You"
link: mediafire [58.5 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: January 2002

I do so much graph nerdery that I really ought to go in and do a graphical comparison of first- and second-run videos on a title in terms of some fixed metric of aesthetic quality. It's not going into the post for this video, a companion piece to SH028, but maybe by the time I get to SH082/083.

Sentenced's official video for this song is particularly bogging. The idea behind it is nice, but the filmography does a particularly bad job of bringing it forward in a way that audiences are going to identify with. I stopped bigging up my videos a long time ago, and will only under heavy conditionals defend an AMV against something that someone actually put effort into filming, but I'm pretty sure this, and any other competently executed amateur video, would be preferable to the video that Sentenced went with officially.

SH028 - and so it ends

2010-06-02T14:21:00.005-04:00

video: Rurouni Kenshin OAV
music: Blind Guardian - "And The Story Ends"
link: mediafire [68.3 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: January 2002

This sort of video is what keeps me editing; something that somehow catches lightning in a bottle and matches up to the standard of the music. I can't remember what the production queue looked like exactly in January of '02, but I do know that this came forward because of source issues; I had the Kenshin OAVs on hand, but not much else, and could get access to a copy of Imaginations..., even though my own was still up at school. (This and SH029 were cut up over winter break when the demo finished earlier than anticipated.)

This one also shows that you don't have to cut the everliving fuck out of a source in order to make a decent video out of it. In addition to the demo 2 charts in the last post, I also dug out the complete project file for this video, which is pictured below on a 6"x9" sheet of note paper.

Seriously, that's it. Less than 80 cuts for just about 6 minutes of music. No effects beyond crossfades. You could get away with that in 2002, and if your source and concept are good enough, you can probably get away with that even today.

Charts like this, with explicit end marks for all cuts that went into the final video, exist for all non-demo vids through SH038. This dictates, basically, what videos I'm allowed to think about remaking and which I'm going to be too lazy to ever consider challenging.

demo 2 and the Musical Chairs Demo guff

2010-06-02T09:38:00.004-04:00

This was alluded to in the post for SH025, and since I was pawing through my project notes last night anyway as part of setting up the rebuild of SH007, I dug out the following pieces of paper to show the evolution of the demo.

This shows the initial plan of what the demo was supposed to be. The videos referenced, for those who can't make out my internal shorthand, are in order:
BAS06
SH025/26; the script from SH025 with the song from SH026, which was originally considered with "Coerced Coexistence", also off the Colony record
SH018
SH026, at least the script anyway, using "Shades of Revolution" from the Kenshin OVA soundtrack
either SH023 or SH020
SH027; well, the script, using a song that would eventually show up in SH048
either SH021 or SH023
BAS11

Things started changing almost as soon as the ink was dry. I had plotted out, at least initially, when I started writing the scripts, a demo that appealed to me, a demographic that at Bowdoin was already in the damn anime club. The first step was to dial the metalness back; this resulted in the more accessible In Flames song getting picked for the new-build video, and SH021 getting cut in favor of another new video that would become SH024. The next step was to make things snappy as well as diverse; SH023 got in over SH020 in that slot, and I had to do something about the seven-minute song assigned to the SH026 script. That something turned out to be slotting the song from the SH025 script in, and throwing a new song in behind the SH025 script.

The last change, for which I'm still not 100% on the reason, was to set the song for SH027. It's probably that The Dreamside were coming off as too kvlt, and I wanted something more accessible, but still fitting the emo parts of the script. Also, "Mirror Moon" would really dominate the script out, which was counter to, um, the entire purpose of making a demo video. One way or another, things got worked over into the form that demo 2 looks like now, as shown in this shot of the credits script:

The slightly different ink color shows that the two substitutions and one addition were done significantly after the script was originally written; this version is what shows up in BAS11.

SH027 - in to you

2010-06-01T15:34:00.004-04:00

video: various
music: Adema - "Giving In"
link: mediafire [39.2 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: January 2002

This video is wicked emo. I have enough other disturbingly emo videos in my catalog (no, not listing by name, they're pretty hard to miss) that I can't get off with blaming this on the spirit of the time and place (2002, college activities fair, emos are a prime target group for anime recruitment). It's the song more than any other fucking thing; even though this was a demo, I couldn't refrain from joking around on the lyrics a little, and it'd be dishonest to say that the chance to overdrive this into OTT dramedy didn't play into the decision to go ahead with this song as the music for SH035.

SH026 - embodied

2010-06-01T15:23:00.005-04:00

video: various
music: In Flames - "Embody The Invisible"
link: mediafire [36.3 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: January 2002

This video includes the first and last pinwheel transition in SH history. Effects like this tend to go one instance per video and never get used again; it's extremely unlikely that the ripple effects or, especially, the Rubik's-Cube-emulation turns used in SH115 will ever make it into another video. What works in one place will not work in others, so the extent to which the pinwheel works here, which is surprisingly effective for being a garbage transition, essentially precludes it from ever being used again. It was supposed to get used again at some point in this video as well, but the editor threw up its arms and crashed horribly in the process, teaching me my lesson.

SH025 - your time will come

2010-06-01T15:11:00.003-04:00

video: various
music: Iron Maiden - "The Wicker Man"
link: mediafire [45.1 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: January 2002

It's really weird for an AMVer to reuse songs, especially someone focused on the music; you do exactly one treatment of a song, and the thought never crosses your mind to re-edit it with a different video source. This makes demo 2 super weird, because this one both and SH027 got redone, more or less exactly ten videos later, as real videos rather than demos. Part of this is that this is a good song that deserved its own video with the source that got used there, and part of it is that this song was never actually intended to be in the demo as per the original script. As noted a long time ago on a different site, demo 2 might better be known as "Musical Chairs Demo" rather than its unofficial internal title of "Revolution '02". Sometime, when I dig out the draft scripts and slotting, I'll put together a full post on the evolution of the final listing, which will be uninteresting except as an illustration of my "start a fight in an empty hoose" abilities as an editor and project coordinator.

SH024 - light of the chosen

2010-06-01T14:54:00.004-04:00

video: various
music: Sentenced - "Nepenthe"
link: mediafire [38.3 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: January 2002

This was the last video in demo 2 as presented at the actual table, but the first to be executed, as I had learned something from the experience of demo 1 and SH014 and decided against putting SH021 into something intended to appeal to general audiences. I needed something to fill the hole in the rotation, though (the demo was already plotted out by the time I thought better), so as a tuneup on the demo, I did up this video featuring newer titles and no script cards, which makes it more of an AMV than most other demo videos.

This one includes a relatively large amount of picture damage; it was while I was in process on source build-out for demo 2 that I discovered that leaving the audio in while pushing the video through TMPEG was causing fidelity problems. I never found out why this was the case; it was enough for me to fix the goddamned problem and then move on. Due to time constraints, I didn't rework the damaged episodes, though, and hence there's some weird breakage in this and the next three videos.

SH115 - Causality

2010-05-31T18:49:00.004-04:00

video: Summer Wars
music: Behold... the Arctopus - Exospacial Psionic Aura
link: mediafire [152.9 MB] (yes, it's fucking huge, but it's 8 minutes of HD video, cut me a break)
editor: Magix 2.0+ deLuxe
production date: May 2010

This is a video that you kind of have to watch, and watch all the way through, to understand. This is kind of a shitty thing to say to someone facing a 153MB download, but if you like bizarro prog-death, it's worth it. There will eventually be another post explaining the video a little more, but I want to try and confuse people first.

The music under the intro is a sample from the start of "Let You Fall" by Dysrhythmia off the No Interference album. The .org, within a close approximation, really does have that kind of decidedly nonrandom-looking behavior.

SH023 - watashidachi no juunigatsu

2010-05-28T17:21:00.003-04:00

video: Love Hina, Yumede Aetara
music: Linkin Park - "My December"
link: mediafire [41.9 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: December 2001

As alluded to on SH020, this was the first occasion on which I did anything that could be meaningfully described as "effects" in a SH video, and it still wouldn't be recognized by the modern AMV community as such. And even though I had the pieces in place -- Virtual Dub process, rough-drafting established -- I still wasted a lot of time rendering through whole episodes on an antediluvian machine....AND still hadn't caught the problem that fucked up SH017 and would cause significant picture damage to a lot of demo 2. The root cause of the problem in question does not make a whole lot of sense, but I should have learned by now that expecting Dazzle to make a whole lot of sense as an editing environment was not a winning proposition.