SH088 - -- (rubicons)

video: Munto OAV
music: In Flames - interstitial track, Soundtrack To Your Escape
link: depositfiles [12.8 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar, Virtual Dub
production date: May 2004

The .org entry for this video lists the music as "Touch of Red". As explained in the entry over there, this is not exactly correct. The music is stored in track 4 on the CD, but it's not really part of the actual song. Instead, it's an undescribed interstitial coming in between that song and "Like You Better Dead". On the excessively remote chance that someone who knows the band ever comes across this, before you tell me to gtfo and take the link down, fill me in on what they call this thing on their rehearsal tapes or whatever.

I did not steal pre-cel pencils for this anime or something in order to make the video. Not only do those not exist because the show was digitally animated, cel painting inherently destroys pencil work and even if such pencils did exist it would have been way too much fucking work for zero return. Instead, animation paint was stripped out the simple and easy way with Lags/Ben Greenwood's difference filter, which is or should be the centerpiece of every filter chain that needs to quickly and efficiently turn a colored-in image back into lines. The point was to turn the video back into pencils, so I didn't throw in a threshold like I did on INSO13.

SH043 - D I S A R M

video: Full Metal Panic
music: In Flames - "Goliaths Disarm Their Davids"
link: zippyshare [49.1 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: July 2002

This is the only SH video ever to officially win at anything but being bad. (Obviously, INSO10, 11, and 12 won at being bad and got into the Graveyard for it, but that's not the same as trying to be good in a judged contest.) The caption in question was Best Action at the 2002 iteration of CNAnime, probably due to a weak field at a young con and a new source in equal parts, but a win is a win, particularly when it punches your ticket for certain contests that at the time (and maybe even still) require you to have won a recognized award in order to compete.

Not that any award ever arrived, but hey, it's a different country and it's a good thing to keep from being/becoming award-focused. My trophies are of different kinds, and mostly can be sewn into a jacket.

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.

SH021 - indirect

video: Akira
music: In Flames - "Pinball Map"
link: depositfiles [42 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: November 2001

This was the first video that I used rough-drafting on, a process that would endure for the next 71 videos, bar one that I did in Virtual Dub alone, and demos 2 through 4 for which that would have been a fucking waste of time. What this involved was, when cutting up the capped MPEG2 source, making two clips, one at the normal, original resolution, and one in crappy MPEG1 with an otherwise-identical name ending in _d (if I recall correctly) for "draft". When making the video, I would use only the draft clips, for better live synch, and then once the video was drafted to satisfaction, go back and rebuild it out of the high-quality source, matching the mark points as noted on the sheet of paper that was serving as the project file.

I could get away with this, of course, because MovieStar was basically a linear editing environment. Fucking around with clips, limited only to shortening them anyway, was a deadly bad idea for stability reasons, and similarly, the only effects were transitions and the only transition that didn't look like garbage was the crossfade. This limits what you can do, but makes it a lot easier for a learning editor to get themselves established in this kind of process.

Paper project files and the drafting process had their limitations, though; on SH063 I left about seven cuts out of the paper notes when drafting, which made things harder in the final assembly process than they needed to be, and on SH090 I accidentally destroyed one of the HQ cuts while making the drafting version. Of course, this was the luckiest video for it to happen on, because the source was an upscaled 320x244 ASF so I wasn't really losing any detail, and the video wasn't ever going to be generally distributed anyway.

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.