Anime – Sailor Moon
Song – Culture Club – Do You Really Want to Hurt Me
Completed February 2005
Premiered April 29, 2005
AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link
This video has a bit of story behind it.
Sailor Moon was the first anime series I saw (in 1996, I believe), and is what drew me into the genre and AMVs (old RealPlayer music videos from Jet Wolf’s page ^_^). However, Chibi-Usa annoys me to no end. Which is why I find the Chibi Project hysterical. I first stumbled on the site longer ago than I can remember (right after the electric saw test, I think), and had forgotten about it until Bakuretsucon 2004, where Patrick D was a guest. Revisiting the site brought back many memories and is even funnier than the first time I saw it.
Boy George’s music in general, and “Do You…” in particular also irritate the heck out of me. Whenever it came on the radio, I would wait for the first “Do you really want to hurt me?” line, say “YES!” and change the station.
So when the song happened to come on as I was reading the Chibi Project’s website, the idea was born.
The video’s title comes from the name of a pair of rabid anti-Chibi-Usa groups on the alt.fan.sailor-moon newsgroup that I was reading during my first experience with fast internet during the summer of 1998. LAKACUA, which is an acronym for Let’s All Kick Annoying Chibi-Usa’s A**, has a homepage that hasn’t been updated since August 2001, so I think it’s safe to assume it’s a defunct group now, though I no longer play on Usenet to confirm that. Project CURE (Chibi-Usa is Really Evil) also has a website, which hasn’t been updated in even longer (March 2001).
As a small possibly in-joke, the voice saying “Scratch One” over the final text is taken from the old Mac Classic game Terminal Velocity, for which Patrick D provided voices. I can’t confirm whether that particular voice is his, but I though it was a nice tribute to the guy who came up with the Chibi Project in the first place.
Please note, I am not, nor have I ever been, a member of LAKACUA, Project CURE, or any other anti-Chibi-Usa group. I just dislike the character, and take humor where I can find it.
I also am not a member of the Chibi Project staff. The images from the Chibi Project site are copyright ADEQUATE.com, and are used with permission.
Technical
This video is also the first time I tried a number of different technical things.
Firstly, this video is the first time I used AVISynth to try cleaning footage. All my earlier videos used whatever came off the DVDs, IVTCed if needed, but with no attempt made at cleaning it up. Since the Sailor Moon DVDs we got in the US are very low quality DVDs, cleaning was absolutely necessary. I may have overcleaned some scenes, but for a first attempt, I think the video looks light-years better here than what came off the DVDs.
Secondly, this was my first attempt at lipsynching. Given the huge amount of frame jitter in the show, I decided to go with the “overlay mouth” method, letting the background run, and only covering the mouth region of the character. I only synched a few scenes, and just let lip flap run for the rest of the video. I figured the scenes I didn’t synch don’t distract that much from the rest of the video, so why not just let them go? All in all, I think it’s not a bad job.
Lastly, this was the first time using After Effects for anything more complex than the overlays in the round segment of Not What You See. These effects didn’t come off that well, I think, so that tells me I really need to learn how to use AE better before attempting anything as complex as masking a character into another scene.
Convention History:
Anime Boston 2005 – Entrant, non-Finalist
AnimeEvolution 2005 – Entrant, non-Finalist