SH074 - kiitos (- o wa ri -)

video: Rurouni Kenshin Seisouhen
music: Sentenced - "Aika Multaa Muistot (Everything Is Nothing)"
link: depositfiles [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.

SH065 - alone

video: Rurouni Kenshin
music: Sentenced - "No One There"
link: depositfiles [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.

SH029 - Harvest of Thorns

video: Rurouni Kenshin OVA
music: Sentenced - "Killing Me Killing You"
link: depositfiles [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

video: Rurouni Kenshin OAV
music: Blind Guardian - "And The Story Ends"
link: zippyshare [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 WAS pictured below on a 6"x9" sheet of note paper before ImageShack died.


[pretend there's some 15-year-old scribbled timecodes here]

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.