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.

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.