Anime – Various
Song – Def Leppard – Rock of Ages
Completed June 2008
Premiered August 22, 2008
AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link
As far back as my first full-length video, Big in Japan, I’ve wanted to do something like this, with as much concert footage as possible jammed into a single video. The idea went through at least ten different songs paired with it, and I actually started working on something using Eric Johnson’s “Cliffs of Dover” to all guitar footage before realizing how boringly repetitive and low-energy what I was creating was (plus the need to sync so much guitar movement was a serious pain for the tiny benefit it gained). I scrapped the idea, but for some reason kept all of the ripped DVDs on my hard drive for a couple months.
Meanwhile, I picked up Def Leppard’s “Vault” album after hearing a couple of their songs on the radio and liking them. The song “Rock of Ages” just jumped out at me, and I started gathering even more footage to work with, since so much of what I had already pulled together was guitar-focused. During this time, I was helped immensely by Val and Kim, who lent me several DVDs that I ended up using, as well as recommendations for series to look in from Meteor Dragon (thanks especially for the BECK recommendation), GloryQuestor, ngsilver, Kionon, and Kitsuner.
I also have to extend immense thanks to ZephyrStar for allowing me to use (and providing lossless copies of) the scenes of Yotsuba playing the guitar from his incredible Daydream video.
There were also quite a few series I had that didn’t end up in the final video, for whatever reasons, especially Idol Defense Force Hummingbird and Perfect Blue.
Technical:
Probably the most problematic footage of what I actually ended up using was from the Zillion: Burning Night OVA, which came from a VHS tape, as no DVD of the show exists, even in Japan. I ended up playing the tape in an SVHS deck, recording it onto a MiniDV deck, then importing from the MiniDV tape to the computer, and finally running it through a metric ton of AviSynth filters to clean it up (the final script ran at about 0.7 fps).
The rest of the footage was pretty easy to work with by comparison, though several of the DVDs I was working with exhibited ugly frame blending, which I was successfully able to fix in some cases, not so well in others, but the result still looks fairly good.
Other than a little bit of lip and instrument sync, the most complex effect in the video is an additive dissolve, so the goal of a simpler-looking old-school video was achieved.
Contest Participation:
AnimeEvolution 2008 – Entered
Anime Weekend Atlanta 2008: Pro Competition – Finalist for “Best Various”
Another Anime Con 2008 – Finalist
Bakuretsucon 2008 – Finalist
Youmacon 2008 – Winner, Staff Pick