SH042 - burn the candle at both ends

video: various
music: Sentenced - "Neverlasting"
link: depositfiles [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

video: various
music: Pain - "On And On"
link: depositfiles [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

video: various
music: Iron Maiden - "Can I Play With Madness?"
link: depositfiles [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

video: various
music: SHIMOKAWA Mikuni - "Tomorrow"
link: depositfiles [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.

demo 2 and the Musical Chairs Demo guff

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

video: various
music: Adema - "Giving In"
link: depositfiles [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

video: various
music: In Flames - "Embody The Invisible"
link: depositfiles [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

video: various
music: Iron Maiden - "The Wicker Man"
link: depositfiles [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

video: various
music: Sentenced - "Nepenthe"
link: depositfiles [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.

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.

BAS17 - Demo 3 outro

video: too many leftovers of Demo 3 to list properly
audio: Evergrey - "Rulers of the Mind" (remix sample)
link: depositfiles [13.8 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar, Virtual Dub, Nero Wave
production date: June 2002

The last video done for BAS, and the last video in this demo, this one includes the most editing that I did on this kind of credits video. Not so much the video track, which is pretty much the same long series of long fades that came up in the prior two, but in the audio, definitely, which led on to stuff like SH046, SH085, and way down the line, SH096.

BAS12 - Demo 3 intro

video: Run=Dim, titles
audio: Soilwork - "As We Speak" (sample)
link: depositfiles [4 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: June 2002

For the last BAS demo, done up after I graduated, a different song sample with a linkable band and something more approaching production values. This was done up over that summer and, I think, mailed back, because good bandwidth was scarcer back then. I have no idea if this actually screened, or if this is the first time it's been out in front of general audiences.

BAS11 - Demo 2 outro

video: too many leftovers of Demo 2 to conveniently list
audio: Borknagar - "Embers"
link: depositfiles [14.7 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar and Virtual Dub
production date: January 2002

With a bunch of levels work on the pre end and some fancy Sub Station Alpha titles in post, this is a definite step up from the previous outro, if only in the "knowing how to use Virtual Dub" department. The levels of "editing" here are not generally high, but there isn't absolutely no synch.

BAS06 - Demo 2 intro

video: The Boy Who Saw The Wind, titles
audio: Bound For Glory - "46 Years In Hell" (sample)
link: depositfiles [3.9 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: January 2002

This video uncoincidentally uses the same audio as BAS01; it was lying around, I didn't have to worry about finding another upbeat riff-section, and it connected this demo with the last one. This one, though, was made at a good resolution, and "remastered"; this is actually the first time that this has been mixed down for distro as opposed to strung together with other MPEG2 files, but it was mixed down in the SH Remasters Project, so, "remastered". Doesn't matter; what does is that this preserves the "polar bear" clip that was used as the interstitial on this demo.

BAS05 - Demo 1 outro

video: Ranma 1/2 movie 1, Bounty Hunter: The Hard, Cowboy Bebop, Berserk, Mystery of the Necronomicon, Rurouni Kenshin OVA, Rounin
music: Linkin Park - "Cure For The Itch" (edit)
link: mediafire [15.5 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: August 2001

Using, like all the outros, scraps left over from the main videos of the demo, this one set the tone for the rest to follow. Even though I mismatched aspect ratios and did horrible titles and produced this thing in MPEG1, it did successfully set the tone for the outros to follow, which improved steadily. And yes, Lord Rae has a credit in there; I used his 8 Stops 7/Eva vid in the screener reel, which is the reason why it is not going to get distroed here, even though I do have a copy of the whole 30-minute thing. On later demos I used playlists; here, old-school all the damn devastating way.

BAS01 - Demo 1 intro

video: original; titles
audio: Bound For Glory - "46 Years In Hell" (sample)
link: depositfiles [3.8 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: August 2001

This is pretty much a nothing video; titles done in MovieStar's horridly bad internal titling app and an audio track just cut down to the opening riffs. This is straight out of the editor; like everything else before SH017 (except SH011, of course), there wasn't any remastering to be done because better versions don't exist.