SH056 - LinkinBread K

video: Kogepan (plus other crap in the intro)
music: Linkin Park - "Cure For The Itch"
link: depositfiles [31.5 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: October 2002

This is the SH video that comes closest, even now, to what normal people might define as a mash-up or pure Video Art. As such, it's desperately out of character, but it's a reminder at least to myself that even with the incredibly blunt instruments I had at my disposal at the time, I could still do something like this. I'm pretty sure that I didn't have any illusions about editing professionally even before this one -- I was having a hard enough time finding someone to pay me for what I was actually trained and qualified to do -- but despite liking the process and the end product, this video really cemented that I wasn't going to be running about with a video potato masher in the future, looking for disparate things to smash together. The only even indirect successor of this video is SH096, and only for the extensive audio and video editing on both sides -- and that one's a hell of a lot more "in character" than this.

As noted, there are a bunch of other sources used in the intro, which are documented in the end card. End card or no end card, I can't give doki enough credit, hence the link in the actual writeup.

There is an Animax logo in the video that is not attested to in the pic above. This is because it looks like garbage, and I can remove logos in still frames, but could not in my editing environment when this video was put out. Actually, I still can't even now, and I view this as a good thing, because it keeps me motivated to buy stuff I want to work with when it comes out commercially.

SH023 - watashidachi no juunigatsu

video: Love Hina, Yumede Aetara
music: Linkin Park - "My December"
link: depositfiles [41.9 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: December 2001

As alluded to on SH020, this was the first occasion on which I did anything that could be meaningfully described as "effects" in a SH video, and it still wouldn't be recognized by the modern AMV community as such. And even though I had the pieces in place -- Virtual Dub process, rough-drafting established -- I still wasted a lot of time rendering through whole episodes on an antediluvian machine....AND still hadn't caught the problem that fucked up SH017 and would cause significant picture damage to a lot of demo 2. The root cause of the problem in question does not make a whole lot of sense, but I should have learned by now that expecting Dazzle to make a whole lot of sense as an editing environment was not a winning proposition.

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.

SH001 - Nagisa Overhyper-Rhapsody

video: Here Is Greenwood
audio: Linkin Park - "One Step Closer"
link: original depositfiles [23.9 MB]; remastered depositfiles [26.2 MB]
editor: DazzleMovieStar
production date: May 2001

This is so old as to have almost become kvlt by osmosis. This doesn't make the music any better, but it does help in the making-excuses department. When I got started, Linkin Park was a disease in AMVs that had not yet become the roaring, all-devouring plague that they turned into by the middle of the decade, and this video kind of shows why; short, not especially complicated songs that are easy to videograph. So, I started with one too, like everybody else, because it was a two-and-a-half minute project that would allow me to work from what turned out to be only 22 minutes of subbed VHS footage (none of the stuff from ep 1 actually made it into the video) without a) tearing my hair out; b) including stuff with subs on them like a noob; or c) having to figure out some lolpro way of getting around subs in a consistent fashion. Path of least resistance wins every time.

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.