New AMV: “Saiyantists”

Mike made another new AMV?! And it’s Dragon Ball again…?!

Presenting: “Saiyantists”

This new video has its roots in a somewhat recent New Year’s tradition a small group of us have been partaking in: making AMVs, but with a twist! For 2022 we all contributed video sources (an episode or two of a particular show) and created a unique video around the theme of “friendship” (I’m especially proud of my video from that year!). For the next two years we’ve been blind-drawing each others’ names and creating Secret Santa-style AMVs for each other.

I can’t show you my 2023 video (it was publicly screened just one time — during the 18+ AMV block at Otakon 2024…), but this one stems from New Year’s 2024!

For this video, I drew JP’s name. If you don’t know JP from our Saturday night Mario Kart streams, pretty much all you need to know can be found on the “About” page for his podcast, The Space Above Us.

As part of the process, we all write up notes and suggestions that our secret editor can refer to either to find inspiration for a video source or song, editing preferences, etc. etc. etc. I ignored everything JP wrote (as he did the prior year for me — yes, we traded back to back!) because I knew exactly what I wanted to do as a concept, and what song I was going to use.

I had always wanted to make a Dragon Ball (likely Z-specific) music video that was just landscape shots — you know, waves crashing, clouds floating, trees blowing, crabs falling off rocks… you get the picture! Total “vibes-only” video. I took this as an opportunity to do that idea, except with “space” as the concept instead.

I’ve never made a video quite this way before, but it reminded me a lot of the old video capture card days, when you didn’t have full episodes available to you to just scrub through digitally on your timeline — you watched tapes, took notes, selected clips ahead of time, and because you didn’t have enough storage space you could only capture exactly what you needed to work with. Along those lines, I scrubbed through the first 120ish episodes of Dragon Ball Z and made a bin of every single “space” scene there was. If it was a bunch of stars, I clipped it. If there were planets, I clipped it. Spaceships? Clipped. Galaxies? Clipped. Anything remotely “space” vibe? Clipped!

I dragged all of those clips onto the timeline after the song, and that was all that I worked from, selecting and placing back earlier on the timeline… mostly!

You’ll notice a few sections that aren’t quite “space”-related, but make sense in the context of the song. I found as I kept going that I needed even more space scenes, so I expanded my scene selection to the first 40-odd episodes of Dragon Ball GT.

The biggest hurdle was the Stephen Hawking section. I had no idea what to do there, because its narration didn’t fit with the rest of the style I had already established in the video up to that point — which is to say, I was focusing on just “space” shots, without showing actual characters (more on that soon). The narration of this section, however, really seemed to want that, and some other kind of editing style or beat/sync matching.

In a little bout of brilliance, I remembered JP’s video to me from the prior year, which had a bunch of cameos from other anime series intermixed with the main Bardock TV special. At bare minimum I wanted some Haibane Renmei representation (one of his favorite shows), and that just opened the floodgates for other ideas. There are some normal anime favorites in there, plus a nice second half with in-jokes and other surprises.

The whole thing came together pretty quickly, efficiently… and most of all, it was fun to make! So as a little bonus for this write-up, here is the original New Year’s 2024 version that I made for JP:

As noted earlier, I ended up loving the video so much that I planned on editing and adapting it further to submit to Otakon the next year. It’s extremely hard for me to come up with AMV ideas (nevermind the motivation to work on them) these days, so with something I was already excited about, it made sense to repurpose it.

You might not be able to tell, but a ton of extra editing work went into the “final” version of the AMV that was ultimately submitted to Otakon. Here are a few key points and musings on it all:

• Edited in full 480p, baby!
• The intro/outro clips from Cosmos are from my own personal DVD rips, not the original Symphony of Science video. That’s why they look so much better!
• There are a bunch of scene selection shifts in the final version. Some of this was because I thought I found something better, or that it moved in a different way that aided the flow I was looking for. Another rule for the final version of the video that I set for myself: do not show any full character faces.
• I’m pretty sure the first scene that popped into my head when conceptualizing the video was the cool artistic shot of Freeza hovering above and looking like he’s going to grasp Planet Namek, which I originally dropped over the “invent the universe” line. I think it’s cool imagery, but it’s a bit silly looking, and sets the video off on a hokey tone, rather than a serious/vibe-y tone. I’m about 80% on the “Vegeta Kami” replacement shot, which I gave some transparency overlay with other general space footage. It’s certainly a better fit for the “final” video.
• Along those same lines, another “make it less hokey” scene swap was showing the half-eaten apples dropping to the ground instead of Goku opening the fridge. That shot violated the “don’t show a face” rule, and was very silly. Great for New Year’s… less great for the final video.
• It comes close with Gohan walking up to the spaceship window. I actually thought about masking out that section and having him just standing there (back to the viewer) the full time without the walk-on, but I ultimately felt the movement from the walking added even more weight to the scene.
• There’s one scene change where I had (I think it’s…) Vegeta powering up or turning Super Saiyan or something on that random planet out in space, and it kinda looks like a side moon is exploding… and while I liked some of the motion in the animation, it bothered me too much that it wasn’t really a “space” thing, so to speak, so I changed it in the final version.
• There’s great motion in the two scenes starting around 0:59 that are just tilted pans of space stuff. The timing of it fit perfectly, but the motion of it conflicted with how the motion in the scenes both before and after it felt, so what you see there is actually that scene played backward! The dissolve on the two tilted shots is part of the original footage, so those two scenes are played as-is, just reversed. The motion fits perfectly with the surrounding scenes! Nice!
• I love the internal timing of the keyboard typing starting around 1:55. While you’re there, also watch for both the internal timing on the finger slide and the cloud flying by. All of that was extremely intentional.
• I made some nice updates to the “brain” section of the video from the original New Year’s version. I didn’t just want to keep being super literal showing Dr. Uiro, so I was psyched to find that computer scan still frame from the Mecha Freeza material, which I then masked for the scan underneath. There’s still one more literal brain scene, but it’s less offensive now. The rest of that whole segment I super dig, especially the computer code (from them scanning No. 16) and the Dr. Mu stuff with the hands and pins and needles.
• Obviously I chose a bunch of new scenes for the Stephen Hawking version. The first half is basically the same, but the second half is new stuff! I chose scenes in such a way that the first half features characters by themselves, while the second half features a couple/duo. Got some 80s/90s goodness in there.
• In that same scene, I did a bunch of extra work on the Freeza cutout. In particular, I reduced the black outline, and gave the whole cutout itself like a 1-2% blur to give everything a little more depth of field. (That background is a real photo from the mission control center at the Johnson Space Center!) I like the look of this block a lot more in the final version.
• JP is responsible for naming the video.

I assumed there had been plenty of AMVs to this song since it originally came out in 2009, but I purposefully didn’t seek any out to watch ahead of editing my own video.

Imagine my surprise sitting there at Otakon 2025 in the “Vic’s Picks” AMV programming block, and one of the first videos that plays is one set to the same song by Studio Hybrid (Nic Neidenbach). He released it in 2011… literally the very next year after we stopped originally going to Otakon! I had just missed it! It’s a bummer that the video was taken down from YouTube, “…due to a copyright claim by Druyan-Sagan Associates, Inc.” Doesn’t bode well for the longevity of my own here.

I think that’s it! That’s all the story I got! Enjoy the video (while it lasts?), and I guess I should get around to making an entry for it on the ol’ org.

(Psst… Meri also made a new AMV this year, and it was also in the contest!)