| I stopped making AMVs well before I got any good at it. It's all Windows Movie Maker 2.0, rendered in WMP 9, with DiVX watermarks and other fun stuff. But no subtitles; I have standards. :) |
| Name: | Sango - "It's Not" | Song: | "It's Not" by Aimee Mann | Footage: | Inuyasha, Episodes 113 through 167 | Notes: |
Meh. Not all that excited about this one, but I was a little bored, and maybe a bit nostalgic after watching the last few episodes, so I thought I'd throw something together. I used a better encoding on this as before, and purposely used all post-episode-100 footage because they represent the highest animation quality of the Inuyasha series, so this video is, if nothing else, visually very sharp.
Like "Hurt," the music has almost no precussion, so I mostly synched scenes to the bass guitar, to the lyrics, and a little bit to the strings. Theme? I think I might have one here. "It's Not" is a song about a pain too deep to be healed by love, and I think it captures the Miroku/Sango dynamic well. Things with Kohaku get worse and worse, and though Miroku tries to comfort her, we often get the feeling that he can't help her in the way she needs help. He gives her understanding, but is that enough? And I believe it's you who can make it better . . . But it's not. I think it's possible this is the fuzziest AMV I've done yet. Pointless cushy Mir/San moments set to music. Hey, It's what I do. |
Annoyances: | I think I could have done a lot more with the last 30 seconds or so. Re-using so much episode 118 footage was something I really didn't want to do, but I couldn't think of any other scene more appropriate. Still, I could've tried harder, and I really feel like I got a bit lazy at the end. | Favorite Moments: | I liked the quick fades around 1:34. I think the "people are tricky" line is a little silly, but I like it. I really enjoy the "Let me fall into the dream of the astronauts" part, especially with that look of growing concern on Sango's face at 2:35. Really, I think everything between 1:34 and 2:38 is pretty darn good. |
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| Name: | Sango - "Possession" | Song: | "Possession" by Sarah McLachlan | Footage: | Inuyasha, Episodes 28 through 132 | Notes: |
I really like this one. The fight sequences are just so great that there was no way for me to lose. I clipped the hell out of the Ep 132 battle to make Sango's sword ring in tune to the cymbals in the song's finale, as well as to make the battle even more frantic. I also did a bit more creative work with special effects, using still frames (which I think go seamlessly) when necessary and using fade outs to both black and white as necessary. I suppose this is the way to do it: very slowly introduce special effects one video after another as I become more comfortable with making AMVs.
Interestingly enough, I've yet to wean myself off MovieMaker 2.0. I suppose I'm so used to the interface, and have such an impressive repository of thumbnailed video clips, that I can't yet see the reason to move on to something more powerful. I should start thinking about making an AMV splash page for Hagakure Productions. |
Annoyances: |
The opening is a bit boring, and the source from most of my video is still pretty ugly. The text of the credits is pretty awful.
There was a problem with the synch due to a hiccup in the encoding, which rendered the same frame several times and made the audio about 1/4 second too early. Since I couldn't fix the damned thing, I just made sure to put a static scene there to make the glitch nearly invisible, and put the rest of the audio out of synch to make up for it. I'm amazed it actually seemed to work. Theme? What theme? |
Favorite Moments: | "Memories trapped in time." Miroku's grin at "Would I spend forever here and not be satisfied?" Sango with her umbrella, and the transition right afterward. "So many times betrayed." Most of the guitar bridge, where Sango's reactions to her nightmare match the riffs pretty nicely. "I won't be denied," which was more or less the inspiration for the AMV. The battle sequence after the last chorus. |
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| Name: | Miroku - "Hurt" | Song: | "Hurt" covered by Johnny Cash. Originally by NIN. | Footage: | Inuyasha, Episodes 16 through 118 | Notes: | My second attempt, and all the better for the experience. I originally wanted to do this song for Inuyasha. ("The needle tears a hole" makes me think of Sesshoumaru driving his hand through Inuyasha's chest, and quite a few of the lyrics go well with Kikyou.) However, I have so many clips of Miroku from the previous project that I thought I'd try it out. Within a few hours I had the first version done. I had enough clips that I didn't need to recycle much from the previous video, which is very good. | Annoyances: | Damned DivX codec put watermarks on a bunch of clips, seemingly at random. Of course, I figured out how to remove the watermarks a few weeks after making the video. Figures. Also, the varying quality of my source video is getting on my nerves – I used a few source clips that were extremly well-encoded, and they look so much cleaner than the rest that it’s just distracting. | Favorite Moments: | "The needle tears a hole." The fight sequence with Inuyasha. "Try to kill it all away." Everything from Episode 118 - I wanted to do those scenes justice, and I hope I succeeded. |
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| Name: | Sango and Miroku - "You Wreck Me" | Song: | "You Wreck Me" by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and "Save Tonight" by Eagle Eye Cherry (credits) | Footage: | Inuyasha, Episodes 26 through 101 | Notes: | My first attempt. I think I over-reached on this one, but I still think it has quite a bit of charm. My high-powered PC certainly had some trouble with it, and I think it was mostly out of frustration that I gave up on this as soon as I did. It took about 40 hours or so to do over a matter of weeks, but most of the work involved cutting clips from my Inuyasha collection that I can (and have) use for later projects. | Annoyances: | Used some third-generation encodings, or worse, making a lot of it very bad quality. Synch with both cuts and action are a bit haphazard - sometimes on the beat, sometimes on the half-beat, sometimes nowhere at all. Learned to forget about getting video synch right for any particular scene until I was certain everything before that scene was perfect. Also, the credits were a bit obnoxious. | Favorite Moments: | The first scene. The first "caress" scene. Sleepwalking Sango. "You move me honey." "I'll be the boy in the cordoroy pants." |
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I uploaded the full-size files to AnimeMusicVideos.org back in the dark ages, before we had flash video and Youtube and running water. I think they're still at my member page. Since then, a few dozen people uploaded my AMVs to various video sites; you can find pretty much all of them with a quick Google Video search. I eventually posted three of my AMVs here. |
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