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.

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.