SH058 - One Way Down

video: Animation Runner Kuromi
music: Iced Earth - "Highway To Hell"
link: depositfiles [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.

SH049 - Prelude to Apocalypse

video: Blood: The Last Vampire
music: Iced Earth - "Damien" (intro)
link: depositfiles [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.

SH006 - Dragons of Blood

video: Pet Shop of Horrors
music: Iced Earth - "Dracula" (edit)
link: depositfiles [49.6 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: June 2001

By this time I had gotten significant enough experience to know when a six-minute song was just not going to work on two subbed episodes' worth of source. Hence the cut, which drops this one, shock horror, to 5:27 while retaining the essential structure of the song. The traditional solution to this dilemma in the AMV community is twofold:

1) don't use a six-minute song in the first place
and
2) if you must, get the other extant volumes of the series

The first one was a nonstarter for obvious reasons; this video, like a lot of other SH videos, is a lot more of an Iced Earth video than it is Pet Shop of Horrors. If the music dominates, you can't change the music without killing the idea. (Additionally, the alternate idea for this source was Metallica's "House That Jack Built", which is even longer, more unwieldy, and less amenable to cutting.) The second got GTFed due to my budget at the time and the reality that the second PSoH tape was not for sale at the anime stores I was aware of at the time. I was not so committed an AMVer then that I would buy source for a video without the co-committant need to watch the show; now, on the other hand, AMVs are about the only reason I buy anime, and will pretty much go to the sole reason after I finish buying Monster and Yawara.