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.

SH008 - breakout

video: Dragon Knight 2
audio: Blind Guardian - "Don't Break The Circle"
link: depositfiles [39.2 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: July 2001

What's a SH video doing here? It's here because this is the infamous "lost video" that isn't connected to the normal profile. There are worse videos published, and there's nothing illegal in it, so there's no point in continuing to hold it back. Hence, here it is. Old notes below, from the last time this was publicly available.



Yes I own this anime, and yes I kind of dig it. This was mostly a really fun vid, and Takeru's fight with Shade over the guitar solo is probably as close as I'll ever come to a pure action AMV. It was really tough to manage all the clips that went into the final fight with the bishop/Lord Leonard, but I pulled it off. Unfortunately the same cannot be said of my first attempt at lip-synch with Jodis at the end, which was worse before a reapplied audio track fixed most of the problems.

About the music: "Don't Break The Circle" is originally by Demon, a forgotten band among many lesser lights of the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal, whose luminaries included Iron Maiden, Saxon, Def Leppard, Angel Witch, Motorhead, and Diamond Head. The version in this video is a cover version by German power/thrash metal band Blind Guardian, released as a CD-only bonus track on their 1989 album Follow The Blind.

About the anime: Dragon Knight 2 is a loose sequel to the original Dragon Knight OAV, based on the popular hentai RPG by elf. The third installment of the Dragon Knight franchise was adapted for American release in the mid-1990s. Both the first and the second Dragon Knight OAVs are licensed for North America by A.D. Vision; all source for this video is from their subtitled VHS release. There are also four OAVs based on the fourth game in the series, but these had not been licensed, or even competently fansubbed, back when I originally wrote this for the CD release, and I'm too lazy to check and see if they've indeed come out commercially (I think I've seen them reviewed somewhere....).