SH115 - Causality

video: Summer Wars
music: Behold... the Arctopus - Exospacial Psionic Aura
link: depositfiles [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

video: Love Hina, Yumede Aetara
music: Linkin Park - "My December"
link: depositfiles [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.

SH022 - maelstr0m

video: Akira
music: Hypocrisy - "Turn The Page"
link: depositfiles [41.8 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: November 2001

This video is weird, loose, and in many ways indicative of being a second-run video powered through at a stupidly late/early hour for no purpose, which it is. Seriously, the average cut in this one is nearly 5 seconds long, which is at least tied for the slowest cutting pace in any SH video. It kind of works with the loose, splashy feel in the music, though -- and on this I'm well satisfied, so I'm not going to rush out and re-edit this from DVD to the version of this song on Catch-22 v2.0.09. Seriously, the original is a decent enough record and an accurate statement on where Hypocrisy was when it came out, it's not so blatantly or stupidly nu-metal as to require Peter remixing/remastering it.

SH021 - indirect

video: Akira
music: In Flames - "Pinball Map"
link: depositfiles [42 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: November 2001

This was the first video that I used rough-drafting on, a process that would endure for the next 71 videos, bar one that I did in Virtual Dub alone, and demos 2 through 4 for which that would have been a fucking waste of time. What this involved was, when cutting up the capped MPEG2 source, making two clips, one at the normal, original resolution, and one in crappy MPEG1 with an otherwise-identical name ending in _d (if I recall correctly) for "draft". When making the video, I would use only the draft clips, for better live synch, and then once the video was drafted to satisfaction, go back and rebuild it out of the high-quality source, matching the mark points as noted on the sheet of paper that was serving as the project file.

I could get away with this, of course, because MovieStar was basically a linear editing environment. Fucking around with clips, limited only to shortening them anyway, was a deadly bad idea for stability reasons, and similarly, the only effects were transitions and the only transition that didn't look like garbage was the crossfade. This limits what you can do, but makes it a lot easier for a learning editor to get themselves established in this kind of process.

Paper project files and the drafting process had their limitations, though; on SH063 I left about seven cuts out of the paper notes when drafting, which made things harder in the final assembly process than they needed to be, and on SH090 I accidentally destroyed one of the HQ cuts while making the drafting version. Of course, this was the luckiest video for it to happen on, because the source was an upscaled 320x244 ASF so I wasn't really losing any detail, and the video wasn't ever going to be generally distributed anyway.

SH020 - heroes

video: The Cockpit
music: Saxon - "Broken Heroes"
link: depositfiles [59.3 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: October 2001

This was the last video to be made at this resolution without some kind of rough-drafting process being in place. However, being a slower-paced dramatic video rather than an action piece, there's a little more leeway as regards to synch, so it matters less. Most of the lyric synch went in as desired, but the musical hits really drove in the point from SH019 that I had to do something about this.

This was the first SH video cut out of source that didn't have hardsubs in it, a consequence of me being a subbie who likes to have the "source" available at all times as well as the translation, making videos out of anime that I liked and owned for other reasons. I got the dub of this in order to make the video, because subbed source was not available; this runs kind of backward to the expectation for AMVers in this period, but it's also what you'd expect from a student obsessed with frugality. The upshot, I believe, was positive: you cannot but teach yourself to cut closely if you're cutting around subs, and if your source has subs on it, you automatically avoid lipflap.

World exclusive: this is the first time that the legended grayscaled version (mediafire, 46.7 MB, still in 320x240 DivX because it wasn't remastered) has been openly and publicly made available. This was done mostly as a print test for SH023, because I was considering doing some grayscale on that -- it turned, of course, into all-grayscale, the first meaningful effects work in SH history -- and I wanted to see what kind of changes would come out in the final video. The lesson was that you had to do the grayscaling on the front end; this one is different from the regular version due to the loss of color, enough so that it's worth noting and keeping around. This lesson stuck all through the MovieStar period, where there was no easy way of adding effects at edit time, let alone swapping/backing out effects.

SH019 - Got The Tri

video: Trigun
music: Anthrax - "Got The Time"
link: depositfiles [30.1 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: September 2001

This is a video that along several axes, was a wakeup call. First, watching the final intro led to the unmistakable conclusion "wow, this is absolute shit, as long as I'm going to be writing actual titles, I should make them not garbage". (Pretentious garbage turned out to be fine, but this is the last immediate, unmitigated, garbage title in the SH catalog.) Second, watching intermediate builds of the video woke me up to the fact that the editing station I was working on was not powerful enough to handle 640x480 4000-kbps MPEG2 accurately for the way I was doing AMVs. This led to independently evolving a bait-and-switch style system sometime before the end of 2001, because I was definitely using it in SH028 and SH029, having intentionally dropped it for demo 2 as unnecessarily complicated. It also planted the seeds of unrest that, to this day, form a permanent tension in my approach to production: since I won't compromise on the live-synch part, I need to find some combination of hardware and production-trick procedures to let me do what I want despite working in high-bitrate MPEG2/Lagarith/HD (substitute chronologically as appropriate).

Benefits of being in college note: at the time of production, I didn't own Persistence of Time. However, the radio station that I DJed on did, and nobody else was playing metal over the air, so I borrowed the CD, ripped the track, and returned it when going in for my show the next week. These days, that would mean going to the record store or doing a lot of fucking around with FLAC converters, so future potential AMVs are definitely a concern in mind as I get rid of records that I don't feel I need to keep around physically.

SH018 - Bakudan Law

video: Shonan Bakusozoku
music: Judas Priest - "Breaking The Law"
link: depositfiles [31.4 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: September 2001

In sharp contrast to SH017, this video intentionally keeps itself inward-focused...though what you need, exactly, beyond Judas Priest and bikers acting like neds generally in time with the music, is kind of unclear. There may be a lesson in that: I'm always going to take risks and attempt projects that go a little bigger than they need to be, but you can get just as good results by simply lining things up and executing. (This and the previous video are running about identical scores over at the .org, separated by 0.03 star rating.) The ending is still kind of crap, but the remastering helps bring out the old-school animation production, at least to the degree that I was able to capture in the original VHS cap.

SH017 - kill me ce noir

video: Noir
music: Iron Maiden - "Kill Me Ce Soir"
link: depositfiles [68.2 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: September 2001

In many ways, this is a quintessential noob video: built out of digisubs without a complete understanding of what that required technically and suffering massively in the video qualify department because of it, and biting off more than it can chew conceptually as well as technically. However, it's important for everyone at some point in their career to make these mistakes, realize that they're mistakes, and work out what they need to do in the future to avoid them. This video kicks off a period in history going from this one through SH032 where I learned a shitton more about the ins and outs of digital video than I ever thought I would need to know when getting into it, a learning experience that has had positive consequences in my real professional life as well as in this hobby.

On the other hand, this was my first time driving a video out past the six-minute mark, which is a skill that people ought to pick up, but most don't, and also the first time blending in a somewhat professional intro as opposed to the abortion on SH010. There's a silver lining to every cloud, even if it's there only because the Chinese shot said cloud up in order to get the rain out of it.

For Iron Maiden fans, this video is probably the easiest way to get this song. It was a B-side on the "Holy Smoke" single and IIRC has not been present on CD re-releases of No Prayer For The Dying, which people have not exactly been knocking down record store walls to buy either. For those who want the original, Golden Earring's Switch record may still be in print, and more convenient than getting the tape re-release of said Maiden record and finding a cassette player these days that's not going to eat it.

Utterly irrelevant historical note: final mixdown of the master copy of this video was done in the early morning of 11 September 2001. There was sort of a delay in getting the first-gen distro copy produced for the campus intranet site afterwards.

SH016 - last smile

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

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

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

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

SH015 - tap my shoulder

video: various
music: In Flames - "Suburban Me"
link: depositfiles [33.5 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: August 2001

This video, as a sale-piece, is a distinct step up from the video that came before it in demo 1, but as the picture shows, still vulnerable to AMV purity trolls bawking about mixed screensizes/aspect ratios without a whole lot of work being put into consistency. On the one hand, they're right; this video contains a lot of avoidable technical mistakes that more practice and having an actual clue about digital video would have resolved. On the other hand, it's difficult for them to be more wrong: the point of this video was not to appeal to AMV heads and other people driven by an appreciation for the beauty of a properly composed series of digital images, but to make something cool to stick in the heads of passing students and make them go hey, what's that, maybe I should join this club and see more of it. As SH014 showed, I had enough on my plate just getting into a demo mindset (as opposed to AMVing for my own tastes) for this one, let alone pick up technical stuff.

Nevertheless, some technical stuff ended up getting picked up; for this one, I did some conversions through TMPEG for the first time. This was awkward and occasionally more trouble than it was worth, but it taught some valuable future lessons.

SH014 - herein

video: various
music: Dark Tranquillity - "ThereIn"
link: depositfiles [55.4 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: August 2001

If you were to try to sell anime to random students at a semi-rural SLAC known for its prep-school bubble atmosphere, this would probably be about the last video that you would pick. And yet, for some reason, probably "undue faith in audience to rise when challenged" or "naive reliance on shock tactics as an emotional hook", this one was the first purpose-built video in demo 1 (there were other, normal AMVs in the first demo, but this was the first "demo video" with an internal sell-script acting as a scaffolding for the videography). The video is not very well-composed even in comparison to the other videos in demo 1, which, as the preview image above shows, is pretty rife with technical limitations due to mixing screensizes without really thinking much about the process. This was something that would be corrected in demo 2, but that's several months down the road at this point, and I'm still working in MPEG1 here.

This is the first video on which I had a "production chain" of any kind; DIVX (no Xvid even yet, folks!) sources got crushed over to MPEG1 via TMPEG before clipping. This was as far as it went, and at this point, it was pretty braindead. The process would not get less braindead until midway through demo 2, and it did not get to anything approaching a more modern degree of smartness until about SH053.

When I entered this video into the .org catalog, I made a mistake and "misspelled" the band's name, using the conventional English spelling of "tranquility". This of course is wrong, since the Swedes in the actual band spelt it with two Ls back when they were putting out their first presumably hand-lettered demo tapes, but the catalog entries have never been merged into the right spelling because it's pretty much just me and Alex Warheart who care, or for that matter make DT videos.

SH013 - A World Below

video: Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water
music: Stratovarius - "Mother Gaia"
link: depositfiles [43.6 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: August 2001

The song on this is kind of crap and was difficult to work with, and this is all-around a pretty limited video. It hangs together a little better than SH004, which is a result of either maturation as an editor, or getting infected by .org ideas that AMVs need to do more than just look cool and Mickey-Mouse synch.

As noted in the original .org entry, this video owes its existence to that most precious quantity, free editor time, in that I didn't need to get cracking on demo 1 yet, and as observed in SH012, its source to the way that my source pool was limited at the time. While I still think the video is decent, I was unhappy at the time with both the way I kind of munged the ending down -- the video more just stops than comes to a conclusion -- and having to cut the song because the coda was so completely useless for videographic purposes. It was a long time before I cut a song again (for anything other than demo intros/outros), but more importantly, this forced me to learn more about alternative ways of gathering source and the technical methods required to do so. When a video goes under production mostly because it is the only idea under survey, it lays down a challenge to the editor to expand what they can do, technically or imaginatively, to bring more ideas into the realm of the possible. This in turn helped out greatly on the upcoming demo, and would be a lifesaver though large parts of 2002 after the capture card died and stayed dead.

SH012 - Give It Up

video: Kite
music: Blame It On Luke - "Cheese Is Safer Than Guns"
link: depositfiles [29.3 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: August 2001

So here we go back to crappy 320x240 and MPEG1, at least for another six videos. My capture card briefly died after eating a less-than-optimally-shielded lightning strike in August of '01, so I was restricted to old source (explains SH013, up next), other people's rips (this one), and a combination of the two (explains demo 1), and as a side effect of this, the old screensize. I did get it back working again once I got back to school, but that's a tale for SH018 when that one comes around.

This was a first not only in using someone else's source collection, but also the first time I used a local band (at least from my area, Chastisement weren't signed either when I did SH003). This continued sporadically later, to the point where another four SH videos ended up getting made with tracks off demos from bands or artists located north of Boston. Amazingly, despite this band being broken up since about 2001, when the members graduated high school, their Angelfire page (linked above) is still active, even though it's pretty much content-free at this point, their MP3 hosting having gone under.

SH011 - _communicate()

video: Serial Experiments: Lain
music: Orgy - "Fiction (Dreams In Digital)"
link: depositfiles [38.6 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: August 2001

It's hard to believe given how history has developed, but this was the first use of this source combo in AMVs, chronologically by production date. I did check prior to starting on it and found nothing. By the time it actually got entered into the .org catalog a year later, though, there were about nine other videos. So it goes -- and an important lesson in that if you want to do something first and have it stick, you need to actually work a bit.

This was the first video, chronologically, to get remastered as part of the SH Remasters Project that went in over November and December 2008. The video itself was still made from VHS source, because I still didn't have a DVD player (and even when I got one, I'd be capping rather than ripping until the start of 2005), but capped at DVD-resolution MPEG2, yielding a master copy that was suitable for doing something with later on down the line.

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.

SH009 - ...embrace my soul

video: Vampire Hunter D
music: Emperor - "Thus Spake The Nightspirit"
link: depositfiles [40.4 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: July 2001

Despite the limitations of working from leftover source -- I didn't go cut the source again, so this is made of stuff that didn't go into SH002 -- and the inability, given the editing environment, of blending stuff together on the long, slowed-temp coda, this still came out pretty decent. This was the first time that I'd gone back to the well on a title, and laid the groundwork for things to come.

As the run of this series will make clear, I very rarely do more than one video for a given anime source. Part of this is a pretty wide diversity in anime interests, so there's no obligation to do song X with source Y because I only have animes Y, Z, and Q to cut up, but a lot of it is approaching the hobby from a music-first perspective. The idea comes in to shape up the video with a series against a particular song, and then, that song executed, it never comes to mind to use that source again. This was an exception, and there are others out there, but overwhelmingly, it's the rule. There's also the conviction, going back to this video, not to use source in a later video that I've used in an earlier project, which tends to cut down on the pure possibility of going back, just due to the natural low availability of really AMV-suitable cuts in any given source. There are people out there who will make dozens of videos with a given show; I'm not sure how they stand it, or avoid getting into a rut via repetition, but I do know that it's not for me.

SH007 should have come next in the series, but that's on the slate to get either remade or remastered -- if it just comes out as a remaster, the original and DVD videos will go in here when the new one's done. If it turns into a remake, SH007 will get its own entry separate of SH116 or whatever number it ends up getting. SH008 obviously already came out.

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.

SH005 - Opposed

video: X/1999
music: Hypocrisy - "Adjusting The Sun"
link: depositfiles [42.5 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: June 2001

I liked this video enough, and importantly, had informative enough production notes, in order to remake it as SH097, which is different enough that it's not getting linked here. (Till it's up on that video entry anyway.) This is a significant barrier to remaking most videos after this, because I didn't track in/out marks much later than this one because it was too much work when cutting source. The original video is still pretty good, despite the crap screensize and ancient technology, so it's worth continuing to circulate.

SH004 - altitude

video: Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water
music: Stratovarius - "Hunting High And Low"
link: depositfiles [36.6 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: June 2001

This one's a bit weird in that it's aged more badly than the other old videos; on forcefully taking a step back from what's going on in the video, it doesn't really hold together that well. This is what happens when new editors try too hard on lyric synch and actually have a source pool to work with; even though getting through SH013 is a chore because the song is kind of crap, that one hangs together as an AMV slightly better than this does.

SH003 - The Edge

video: Ninja Scroll
music: Chastisement - "Rapid Fluid"
link: depositfiles [33.3 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: June 2001

This is what I was trying to do. That is all. Original superior video is still superior, crap SH anklebiting still bites ankles. If you see this video without the frame of reference that, well, everyone watching AMVs with brutal music had in 2001, it's kinda decent, and the band dudes liked it when they eventually ran across it, but it's not intellectually honest to present this without the surrounding context.

SH002 - Angel in Black

video: Vampire Hunter D
audio: Sentenced - "White Wedding" (Billy Idol cover, duh)
link: depositfiles [30 MB]
editor: DazzleMovieStar
production date: June 2001

This was the first of what would turn into, eventually, eight Sentenced videos. There's at least one more left, maybe two, before Shin Hats folds the tents permanently. Sentenced, at least post Amok (and, as everyone knows, this song was on the Love & Death EP that's packed onto the most common re-release of said album), is just a super-eminently videographable band, but for too goddamned long, I was the only one using their music as a backing plane for the rearrangement of other people's video. Boo on other people.

Like the original version of SH001, the picture in this video is small and crappy because it was made from VHS sources capped into MPEG1 at about 1Mbps, and at the native 320x240 that you see in the output. Unlike that video, it was never remade from DVD, and this is not likely to change in the future. At the time of production, this resolution was standard, but now it's verging on postage-stamp. The project I'm working on currently is in HD, with a screensize exactly 12 times larger in area than this one.

The Every Shirt thing went at a pace of one shirt per day, but that was because I could only wear one at a time. This will go a little bit faster.

SH001 - Nagisa Overhyper-Rhapsody

video: Here Is Greenwood
audio: Linkin Park - "One Step Closer"
link: original depositfiles [23.9 MB]; remastered depositfiles [26.2 MB]
editor: DazzleMovieStar
production date: May 2001

This is so old as to have almost become kvlt by osmosis. This doesn't make the music any better, but it does help in the making-excuses department. When I got started, Linkin Park was a disease in AMVs that had not yet become the roaring, all-devouring plague that they turned into by the middle of the decade, and this video kind of shows why; short, not especially complicated songs that are easy to videograph. So, I started with one too, like everybody else, because it was a two-and-a-half minute project that would allow me to work from what turned out to be only 22 minutes of subbed VHS footage (none of the stuff from ep 1 actually made it into the video) without a) tearing my hair out; b) including stuff with subs on them like a noob; or c) having to figure out some lolpro way of getting around subs in a consistent fashion. Path of least resistance wins every time.

incoming - way too much SH crap

In this entry I break the rule I laid down initially. The SH catalog is going to get crossposted here, with some minimal notes, over the next three or so months (maybe more like 4, we'll see), partly for lack of better things to do, and partly as an AMV complement to the Every Shirt thing I did last year over at OFtS. This will let me get some pictures in for old videos, modernize the catalog entries over at the .org, and also shift the legacy catalog to the new model where everything that is on local is also available on indirect.

SH034 is not going to get published as part of this, but SH090 might....just not linked. Like an internet treasure hunt, except the "treasure" is a garbage bag full of mutilated limbs and decaying organs. That aside, it's legitimately important to not exclusively put stuff inside the .org-wall. My remit initially and continuing has been to bring underground music to new audiences, and I'm not sure how making people create one-time-use accounts on a-m-v.org directly assists in that.

There is still going to be no official youtube presence. Policy is still to let other people jack my stuff and deal with the commenters and occasional takedown notices.

INSO16: GIRUY ya (Tokyo) Huns

video: Giant Killing
audio: Celtic FC - Bye Bye Rangers
link: depositfiles [11.8 MB]
editor: Magix 2.0+ deLuxe
production date: May 2010

Caveats:
1) I know the colors are wrong. But from the helpful pictures above, if not the video itself, it should be clear that the hardworking protagonists who do the Huddle are standing in for Celtic, and the insufferable cheating assholes who nevertheless get all the calls and have more stars on their shirt than Brazil, but to commemorate relatively pissant achievements, are, well, Huns.
2) I know it's only 7 wins in 7, and that that in itself means ignoring the Ross County disaster, but I can't exactly change the song, especially for something so off the cuff, and anyways, we beat the Hun yesterday, so time to finally celebrate what we have available to celebrate.

This video came about in the general course of watching Giant Killing, the best new show of spring 2010, and the amazing coincidence that Tokyo Victory, the opponents in the first friendly that Tatsumi's ETU plays, are cheating, diving, arrogant hun bastards who happen to have five stars on their shirt. There are other Timmy dogwhistles scattered throughout the show, at least so far, but this is pretty frickin obvious.

If you like and follow fitba, you need to be watching this show. And if you like this show, you should probably pay attention to the World Cup this summer, dig into the backgrounds of interesting players, and find a club in a non-Big 5 league to support. Giant Killing offers not only real actual football as played by real people rather than magical teenagers, but also a good look into what it means to support a team, and this is something that, if picked up, will go on a lot longer than the show's run, even if it turns into another Star of the Giants.


[UPDATE:] Also, in even better news, the very end of the video is wrong. We are still playing in Boston this year, but not against the Huns, which is a good thing.

[UPDATE 2:] Barely two years after initial release, and this video is completely dated because, of course, Rangers FC went into liquidation on 12 June 2012 and effectively ceased to exist.  The video got re-upped anyway, but I'm not making another one if/when the newhuns get back to a level to trouble anyone.