SH051 - dead worlds

video: Hoshi no Koe
music: Nevermore - "Dead Heart In A Dead World" (intro)
link: depositfiles [16.7 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: September 2002

One depressive Nevermore video follows another due to fast action; I saw the anime for this at MITAC a week or so earlier, borrowed the disc in question from the club library, and set the process up ASAP. With a short musical selection (being, mostly, the riff that Jim wrote on his four-track at some point to set up the song, which ended up being constructed in as an intro), I could make this work by hiding the MPEG2 render behind the wall of sleep (i.e., run it overnight and pick up clipping when I got home from work the next day), but it was still suboptimal as a process.

Despite the fact that a lot of SH videos have a life cycle of months to years, going into the production queue, getting vetted, and going into production after the videos ahead of them finish or get cancelled, I like normal AMVers do work on a scratch-the-itch basis, and if a good idea comes in, it should be turned around into a video as soon as practical. This was the impetus behind this video, and it's also the impetus behind a lot of what I do to speed up my process and reduce time committed. If the latency between start of work and finished idea is reduced, projects get done faster, and spur-of-the-moment projects can get picked up and finished without overly delaying long-scheduled stuff.

If the images on this one and SH050 suck less than the older posts, this means the remaster worked. Older images were done for the antediluvian SH website in like 2005, based on the old versions; these are screencaps from the current versions of the videos in question scaled at 60%.

SH050 - drowning pool

video: Ai Yori Aoshi
music: Nevermore - "Dreaming Neon Black"
link: depositfiles [54.1 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: August 2002

This video was made from a really limited source pool, which shows in the way it's composed; if I recall correctly, four episodes, of which one was unsubbed. Add in to the fact that it's cutting against the grain of the show, and it's not surprising that this one had to get edited down.

Looking back, the constraints that I've been mentioning for the last few posts look clearer and clearer in retrospect: SH048, 049, and 051 are one-episode cuts, effectively, and this one was a minimal 4-ep. Despite this, I was still dumping a lot of time into TMPEG, time that I had less and less of as I cycled up into jobsearch mode. It was no coincidence that doing a deep 13-episode cut for SH052 on top of the effectively wasted render time broke the camel's back.

SH007 - blood to sand

video: Perfect Blue
music: Nevermore - "Narcosynthesis"
link: depositfiles [49.8 MB]
editor: Dazzle MovieStar
production date: June 2001

I held this back when I initially got to it (should have gone in between SH006 and SH009) because at that time I still thought I was going to remake the video. However, that turned out not to be possible for several reasons, some technical and some artistic.

The technical reasons are actually more difficult to explain for once. As it turns out, I for whatever excessively stupid reason ended up deleting the clips that were used in the video before saving the source archive. This meant that while I had a cutlist of mark-in points that corresponded to clips in the source pool, it was the markpoints that didn't correspond to existing cuts in the archive that I had that I had to pay attention to. This made source-gathering a ridiculous chore, since I had not only to translate from the VHS-cap-section timing to the ripped-VOB timing, but grout through the source for stuff that I knew should be there but wasn't, but this may have been a blessing in disguise, because it made the artistic issue all the clearer.

This is a decent video for what it is, the seventh SH video, cut out of a bad print and around subs, and assembled linearly. The problem is that its shortcomings are such and in such dimensions that if I were to remake it, the changes needed to accommodate the new cuts would be enough to change the conceptual thrust of the video. SH007/116 would have come out closer to 116, and I had very little desire to do this song/source combo again, nine years later, under the same retarded cutting constraints as the original. This is why the remake didn't get done: under the constraints of the project, it went from something I wanted to do to something I didn't want to do, and if you want a bright line in AMVing, that's as good as any. Nobody is paying you to do this. Do exclusively the things you want to do, and categorically refuse to work on projects you don't actually want to work on.