Anime – Various
Song – Michael Kamen – From the Earth to the Moon Opening Theme
Completed May 2005
Premiered August 19, 2005
AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link

Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve loved planes and rockets. I devoured every book about the Apollo missions, fighter jets, test pilots, and the Space Shuttle I could lay my hands on, and watched every Shuttle launch I could. I was even watching live when Challenger exploded. My grandfather, a former private pilot, nurtured my interest and encouraged me to become a pilot when I got older. My poor eyesight eliminated the possibility of being a military pilot, and with the expense of obtaining a private license, that dream was put on the shelf a long time ago.

Still, I love the thought of soaring through the skies, which became the source of this video.

I went through the majority of my collection of DVDs looking for footage for this video, and even purchased Macross Plus specifically to make it. I was actually surprised that I own so many things related to flying, since there are several more series and movies that ended up not getting used here.

The audio portion comes from the HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon, that I devoured watching it the first time. Again, the spirit of going higher and farther than anyone has before appealed to me.

The video’s title, Ad Caelum, is Latin for “To the Heavens,” and is a small tribute to a poster I had on my wall for many, many years, showing an astronaut on the moon above the words “Ad Astra de Aspera,” a Latin phrase meaning “to the stars through aspiration.”

The two quotes in the video I found randomly on some “famous quotes” site, when I searched for ones about flying. The Lilienthal one seemed especially appropriate for the feeling of the video.

Finally, there’s no real message in this video beyond the love of flying.

Technical:
This was my first video edited on my PowerBook laptop, using Final Cut Pro. The DVDs were ripped on my PC, since the PowerBook’s drive is not region-free and the video uses some R2 disks, then the VOBs were filtered in AVISynth and uncompressed clips were created using VDub. The uncompressed clips were moved to the Mac and edited, then the final render was done in an uncompressed Quicktime file. This file was brought back to the PC and converted back to an uncompressed AVI file in Quicktime Pro, before making the needed compressions for conventions and distribution.

Convention History:

Otakon 2005 – Entrant, non-Finalist
Anime Evolution 2005 – Finalist
Bakuretsucon 2005 – Finalist, 3rd Place Drama

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