SH069 - i brought you fires

video: SaiKano
music: Dark Tranquillity - "Hours Passed In Exile"
link: depositfiles [48.1 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: February 2003

Almost everything in this video that can reasonably be described as "synch" is the result of accident and closure. A side effect of doing effects in post in the TMPEG->AVS/VDub->TMPEG chain that the source had to pass through for this is that frames occasionally got lost; there are a lot of effects in this video, and the resulting output got fucked up something fierce between effect and correction for such. I really didn't like it when I saw the first final builds, but I like it more now, mainly due to forgetting what the original edit decisions were supposed to look like. This isn't a great video, but it was important, at least for me, in pulling back the veil on what AMV really is.

The natural point of comparison for this video is SH054; similar vintage anime, songs off the same record. I like that one better, the .org prefers this one.

It would have been an easy source of lulz to keep the lid on and pretend this finished before SH068 in order to flip the catalog numbers, but that's not the way the actual production queue worked out. Honesty before all, even when it doesn't count, and is seen by exactly nobody.

SH054 - me[tamor]phitic

video: RahXephon
music: Dark Tranquillity - "Cathode Ray Sunshine"
link: depositfiles [42.2 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: September 2002

Though it involved 30+ hours of production time, this was another relatively "snap" idea, also coming out of MITAC, indirectly; I hadn't been very impressed with the show seeing it as club, but listening through the Damage Done record for the first time, this song immediately jumped out as needing to be videographed with this source. A lot of the hits in this video, especially the ones that actually work, were done mentally while listening to the CD, in the process of forming the idea. This is actually how most ideas get put together; the exceptional case, like the Polterchrist song I had kicking around in my head while watching Good Witch of the West that hasn't actually become a video yet, goes in the other direction. This is how I get at declaring myself music-first; every idea turns into a combination somewhere, but most SH videos take the form of presenting X music using Y anime, rather than using music Y to say something about anime X.

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.