SH079 - Into The Lungs Of Hell

video: Kujaku-oh
music: Gamma Ray - "Fire Below" (edit)
link: depositfiles [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

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: depositfiles [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: depositfiles [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: depositfiles [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: depositfiles [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.

SH060 - The Man From Gomu-Gomu

video: One Piece
music: Gamma Ray - "Lonesome Stranger"
link: depositfiles [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.

SH052 - Another Fine Reason

video: Onegai Teacher
music: Gamma Ray - "Heaven Can Wait" (Blast From The Past re-recording)
link: depositfiles [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.

SH031 - Revolt

video: Fushigi Yuugi OVA
music: Gamma Ray - "Rebellion In Dreamland" (2000 re-recorded version)
link: depositfiles [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.

SH010 - INCOMING!!!

video: Ranma 1/2 - Big Trouble in Nekonron, China
music: Gamma Ray - "Send Me A Sign"
link: depositfiles [38.1 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: July 2001

The intro to this video is garbage. The rest of the video isn't so bad. The music under said intro is the start to Hypocrisy's "Fractured Millennium", off their self-titled, which makes me wish the old Infernal Combustion was still online so that I could link to the article about Hypocrisy and Gamma Ray trashing a motel in a battle arising from differences about whether to watch X-Files or Stargate. (For the metal newbs out there, Infernal Combusion was the underground's answer to/ripoff of The Onion, at least until Infernal Keith got too busy with P.B. Army among other things and stopped writing it.) The video may be a moderately generic Ranma movie 1 fluff piece, but it's a moderately generic Ranma movie 1 fluff piece with FUCKING GAMMA RAY GODDAMNIT.

This turned out to be the first of seven Gamma Ray videos produced by Shin Hats. I don't think there's any more in the pipeline, but you can never be 100% sure with these things.