WTF EX

Those of you who have followed Daizenshuu EX for an extended period of time may be familiar with the sudden drop in productivity sometime around April through June each year. It is during this time that the wife and I turn our attention to working on an Anime Music Video for Otakon’s contest. We have been submitting since about 2001, and have been regular finalists (either individually or collaboratively, depending on the video) since about 2003-2004.

In 2009, we did not make a single AMV. It was the first year we did not do so since 2000 when I got into the game — we did not even make so much as a trailer! My combination of apathy and laziness toward the hobby was rubbing off on Meri as well, and we simply did not get around to making anything that year. Especially after what we were able to create back in 2007, I felt like I had tapped out any imagination I had left. I was pretty damn satisfied.

(Insert generic description about the life-long friends we made from our years in the hobby, still enjoying watching fantastic video output, the amazing creativity people have, yadda yadda yadda…)

We wanted to make something for Otakon 2010, though. It was the only convention we were going to be attending this year, and with so many friends no longer submitting videos (or working on the intro to the contest, instead), our quasi-vested-interest in seeing the overall contest was waning. Also, to be frank… the last few years of Otakon’s contest have been pretty difficult to sit through. I just have not enjoyed them as a whole. I have always said (as both an editor and a coordinator) that if you don’t like the contest, your only course of action as an editor is to put up or shut up — either make a video that you are proud of and submit it, or quit yer whinin’.

So we tried that this year.

The two of us really love songs that tell a story — you look at examples like our Kare Kano video “Fake” from a few years back, and you can see how much we enjoy a song that so perfectly captures the feeling of a series and its characters in mood, sure, but also does so via its lyrics. Is it us (again) just being lazy? Perhaps.

Cage the Elephant’s “Ain’t No Rest For The Wicked” was getting lots of local radio play earlier this year with their album getting re-released (and apparently used in the opening to Borderlands, unbeknownst to us). The song was bound to hit us. The song has a great story to it. The song has a great attitude to it. It didn’t take much convincing from Meri before I agreed to it.

We agreed that it should be a multi-source video with a well-defined cast of characters: (1) the main character who comes across these “wicked” folks, (2) the whore, (3) the thief, and (4) the preacher. It was painfully obvious to us (as you will read later on) that Spike from Cowboy Bebop would make the perfect main character — Spike always works well with other series, and the old west vibe of the song fits in a little too well with the aesthetic of the show. Wolfwood from Trigun was the second easiest to cast, literally being a preacher with baggage, conflict, greed, and internal torture. The others were a little more difficult. We wanted to stick with shows in a 4:3 format to avoid cropping, so any more recent stuff was pretty out of the question. Choosing a notable character to act as the thief who holds up the main character at gunpoint was a tough one. We ended up going with Alucard from the Hellsing TV series (as opposed to Ultimate in its 16:9 format) since he definitely has a gun at all times, and he seemed like he might work well clashing up with Spike. The whore was the most difficult to cast — we did not want to go with Faye, since the other characters were all from different universes, so who would it be? What notable female characters could work in this context? We eventually settled upon Lust from the first Fullmetal Alchemist due to it also being in 4:3, and her demeanor fitting in well with the rest of the cast.

What would the point of the video actually be, though…? One morning en route the train station, I had the brilliant idea: Spike would kill them all…!

That proved a little more difficult than I thought. I remembered Fullmetal Alchemist entirely wrong, and we therefore had no footage to show Lust being killed. Alucard can’t die. Huh. All right, then. Our goal as creative editors is to tell the story we want to tell, though, and we ultimately (to quote Tim Gunn) had to just make it work. We are already making something “new” by combining the video and audio, so to take things out of context and tell that brand-new story really is the whole point!

We decided early on that we did not want to do a whole lot of compositing, and instead (to keep things simple for our lazy selves, and also as a partial challenge) wanted to be clever with our editing. No overboard effects. Keep it clean. Sophisticated. Appropriate for the music.

In the end, we only had one composite shot (someone else’s hand being turned into Alucard’s glove pointed at Spike), with the rest handled through creative editing and cuts.

OK… so there is actually another composite shot later in the video, too… for whatever reason, I don’t classify that in my mind the same way. I guess ‘cuz it’s on a TV.

The most difficult section to edit was the first chorus — it was also the last section we edited. The second and third verses feature a very distinct style of editing, which transitions into more traditional cuts for their respective choruses. The first verse+chorus combo of the video had none of this. There was no consistency! What could we do?! The problem was that the bass introduced in the second verse is not present in the first section of the song, which is what the masks and swipes were being timed to later in the video.

To be honest, we ran out of time and imagination before the Otakon deadline. Neither of us were happy with anything we tried. We had to show Spike somehow brushing her off and ultimately shooting her, but how could we do that with nothing interesting happening in the music yet? We ultimately went with a pretty awful split-screen (top and bottom) showing scenes of each character. Just cuts on a beat. No fades. No swipes. Nothing. It was ugly. It was not something I was proud of, but there was no more time before the contest submission deadline.

Something we had never done before was further edit a video after submitting it to a contest. Done is done, right? I was not about to let this one slide, though. It took us a month (and the impending Anime Weekend Atlanta Exposition AMV Contest deadline) to get it done, but we did. We wanted to do something that would set up the style of edits that would happen in the second and third sections of the video, so a similar style of masks and motion came into play. That bass still didn’t exist earlier in the song, so the timing was based off the lyrics, instead. There are still some split-screens at the end of the segment, but things at least have a flow to them, now. The execution style and initial editing was all Meri, while the timing and direction was all me. Good teamwork!

There you go. We made an AMV this year. Short and sweet, clocking in at just under three minutes. Is it my favorite video that we have ever worked on? Not by a long shot. Forcing these characters into this story certainly worked, but not as “perfect” as I would have hoped. I do think it is a fun video, which is pretty interesting considering that it is so clearly a “Drama/Serious” video underneath it all. What do you think? The attendees at Otakon seemed to like it, as we actually won first place for the first time ever in their contest. Huh.

(Yes, we will be putting up a downloadable version in the near-future. Just haven’t gotten around to it yet.)

I was tossing this out on Twitter one day, but I thought it would be fun to collect a bunch of links here to go along with this post. We never bothered to look to see if anyone else had made an AMV with this song (of course they would have), but it is fun to take a look afterward and see what is out there. Would they use any of the sources we used? Hilariously enough, all four of our sources have been used to make individual videos to the song!

• Here’s one with just Cowboy Bebop
• Here’s one with just Fullmetal Alchemist
• Here’s one with just Hellsing
• Here’s one with just Trigun

There are a ton of other ones out there, too. Take a gander through YouTube. Funny stuff.

If you’re following this blog then you are probably vaguely familiar with who I am, so needless to say, I have a history with Anime Music Videos. Meri got me into them when we met back in 2000; I was seriously non-interested prior to that, but when she showed me some good ones and I saw some of the proven artistic merit, the lightbulb went off.

My involvement with the AMV community has severely dropped off the last few years due to a wide variety of reasons (but mostly just my hobby A.D.D.). Despite that, every year we bang out at least one really good piece that I or we have had in the back of our collective imaginations for some time. What I would like to do is explain where two of these ideas came from, since it’s probably not what you would expect.

It is very rare when the final video product ends up being exactly what I saw in my mind months ahead of time, and I can barely describe the pretentious joy when it does. In 2007, we were able to create a video that very nearly satisfied every bit of creative juice in my body. That video was “Never Fall Apart“, which I made together with Meri and Jeff.

If you know me, then you can probably tell that Echo Image isn’t exactly in my normal scope of musical interests. It’s not that I wouldn’t be interested or wouldn’t care for the genre, but it’s simply not on my radar. I was introduced to the song we ended up using (“Will You Know?“) on a live internet radio show done by fellow podcaster “Rob Roberts”, host of Orange Lounge Radio. At some point earlier that year, Rob was running a random live show on Wednesday evenings (I think?) simply called “The Rob Roberts Show” where he would play music, take calls, talk about random stuff, etc. In addition to Cascada’s “Every Time We Touch” (which I had unbelievably never heard up until that point), Rob played this Echo Image song, which is actually a b-side on the Standing Alone CD single. I couldn’t believe my ears. The song was absolutely stunning, and combined all sorts of beautiful, individual segments together (I’m a huge fan of incorporating acoustic guitar into electric pieces). At this point there was still no AMV idea, but I simply had to have the CD. I was luckily able to order the CD single off of Amazon for standard retail price (something like $6 or $7), instead of the $30+ it’s going for used, now.

The song embodies everything I love about my various favorite anime series, which is friendship and comraderie (DragonBall, One Piece, Pokemon, Honey & Clover… yeah, no recurring “friendship” themes at all…!). It was no stretch to end up with an AMV idea using it, and Honey & Clover made so much sense, being a recent favorite series and jumping to the total opposite end of what I normally do with shonen friendship videos (see: “I’m Above The Age Of 10 And I Like Pokemon“).

Again, it was absolutely everything I wanted the video to be, and is probably the final over-the-top AMV production I will ever create (of course thanks to Meri and Jeff’s help!).

( XviD Direct Download: 57.6 MB )

The other video is not even one I worked on in the slightest, but I suppose you could say it was “my idea”. After finishing BECK: Mongolian Chop Squad, I had a ton of random AMV ideas (once I realized that while I really disliked every single character in the show, I truly enjoyed the actual show itself and a lot of the character development). In addition to a few other ideas that I’ll shut up about since I may still actually make them, one of the “joke ideas” was “Juke Box Hero” by Foreigner. While I was vageuly familiar with the song, it wasn’t until Dave brought it up (and sang it?) shorly after the release of Rock Band on the podcast Fast Karate For the Gentleman that the AMV idea hit. When Meri was short on solid ideas for an Otakon video for 2008, I suggested this one, only half-expecting her to take it seriously (especially since she hated the song so much). Much to the surprise of both of us, the final product of “One Guitar” not only ended up being pretty solid, but has gotten an amazing amount of wonderful feedback from all sorts of people (including coming in second in its category at Otakon and winning the “Guitar Hero” award in Anime Weekend Atlanta 2008′s Exposition contest).

( XviD Direct Download: 67.2 MB )

So there you go! Two of our favorite self-created videos indirectly inspired by other random podcasters out there. Whoda thunk it?

This has nothing to do with Spore. Sorry.

One of the funnest (see what I did there? It’s topical!) things that Meri and I do after AWA is create some kind of “mix-tape” (well, an MP3 playlist that may or may not be burned to CD for my line-in-less car audio system) of our favorite songs-from-AMVs over the last year.

I’m not going to lie and say I don’t just grab a song or two from friends when they’re the ones that have done the videos (Hell, half the time they’ve sent me the song long ago, anyway). This isn’t going to be any kind of general defense or offense one way or the other on file sharing, though.

However, at the same time, I’m not going to not try and legally pick up some music every so often. I think it’s pretty important. It makes me feel warm and fuzzy on the inside. I guess it’s as much for me as it is for the artists. Regardless, my point is that the Amazon MP3 service is awesome and you should use it. Right now. Here are the couple songs I grabbed last night:

Asobi Seksu – “Walk On The Moon” (from Koop’s/Jay’s video “Twilight“) – 99 cents
DJ Spoke – “Watch Them Fall Down” (from Xavier’s/Nostromo’s video “Auriga“) – 88 cents

What was really interesting to me was that the first place I looked was still the iTunes Store. For whatever reason, that’s still where I go first. However, I absolutely will not purchase any music from there, these days, unless it’s iTunes Plus (DRM-free and higher bitrate… I think it’s 192 kbps AAC, as opposed to the standard 128 kbps AAC). The compression is better and more efficient with the AAC, so if I can get that version DRM-free, it still makes sense to me to get that above the MP3.

Sounds like the new Android phones are going to have the Amazon service built-in. Oooooh… it’s on, now.

What about you guys? Best source for music? Preferred format? I know you’ve got some thoughts, Mr. Campbell .