Honou Productions

Anime – Various
Song – Carl Sagan – Pale Blue Dot Chapter 1: You Are Here (excerpt) & Dana Cunningham – The Color of Light
Completed July 2009
Premiered September 18, 2009
AnimeMusicVideos.org link

I really can’t say much about the content for this one, since I’m not sure I have the words to say it right. Mr. Sagan will just have to speak for me.

On a technical level, my goal was to not use any series more than once, but time pressure (this was actually finished during the two-day FTP upload window) forced me to use a few twice (I think there’s four or five that are repeated).

I’m really proud of this one, and I’m glad that people have said they liked it. Thanks for watching.

Contest History:
Anime Weekend Atlanta 2009: Pro Contest – Finalist, Best Artistic Endeavor category
Kurokiiro 2009 – Finalist
Another Anime Con 2009 – Entrant
Bakuretsucon 2009 – Finalist
Youmacon 2009 – Winner, Best of Show

Anime – Various
Song – Def Leppard – Rock of Ages
Completed June 2008
Premiered August 22, 2008
AnimeMusicVideos.org 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 sucessfully 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

Anime – Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS
Song – Coldpay – Don’t Panic
Completed October 2007
Premiered October 10, 2007
AnimeMusicVideos.org link

My video from the Online Iron Chef Tournament 3.0 Round 1, which lost to Douggie.

Not really a fan of the song, but the video didn’t come out too badly.

I gave it a title when it got sent to Youmacon in response to ngsilver’s begging for entries. The title means nothing, it’s just a pair of words that sound relevant and form the initials “IC.”

Convention History:
Youmacon 2007 – Winner, “Most Orignal”
Bakuretsucon 2007 – Finalist

Anime – Card Captor Sakura
Song – Lazytown Soundtrack – Step By Step
Completed February 2007
Premiered April 20, 2007
AnimeMusicVideos.org link

This idea came to me while I was digging through my short songs looking for something that might have fit the “Magical and Musical” magical girl MEP. I ended up not joining the project, but the song paired with CCS stuck in my head.

The overall idea was to showcase Tomoyo’s contributions to Sakura’s adventures, which mostly consist of costumes and videotape. The main realization I came to while going through the series:

Tomoyo is a really creepy girl at times.

Technical
Ripped/filtered on my Windows desktop, edited in FCP on my Mac laptop.

Digital effects came out in force for this one, especially the opening sequence, which took twelve video layers, and I’m quite proud of how it came out. Each of the “Hollywood Squares”-type also have their own internal linking theme, if you look for it.

Convention History:
Anime Boston 2007 – Finalist
Toracon 2007 – Winner, Sports/Romance/Other
AnimeEvolution 2007 – Finalist
Bakuretsucon 2007 – Finalist

Anime – Pom Poko
Song – Michael & Patty Silversher – Gummi Bears Theme Song
Completed December 2003
Premiered February 13, 2004
AnimeMusicVideos.org link

The blame for this one lies squarely on sleep deprivation, too much sugar, and Richard “Pocky” Kim’s performance at Katsucon 9.

A few months after Katsu, immediately after our finals finished, two friends and I sat down to bounce AMV ideas off of each other, while we played songs in the background. When someone dropped this CD into the player (we’re still not sure who did), we remembered Pocky’s bouncing onstage to this song at the cosplay. I had the “bright” idea of doing a video to this song to torment poor, long-suffering Pocky with at the next Katsucon. After much laughter, we moved on to other ideas, but I hung onto the image of the ubiquitous con personality bouncing on stage in the back of my mind, and decided to actually do it.

The first order of business was to decide what anime to use. I rejected several ideas (Chibi Goddesses, Record of Lodoss War (SD segments), and other similarly cute shows) before I stumbled across the Ghibli classic Pom Poko in the anime club library, which was due for a R2 DVD release very shortly. The DVD was preordered in short order (Hey, you can never have too much Ghibli).

Unfortunately, the other piece of footage that I desperately wanted to include was not available, as the copy of it that I asked the Katsu con chair for got lost en route to me. Having the actual scene of Pocky at K9 in the video would have been wonderful, and I actually created an edited version of the song specifically to include that five seconds of his embarrasment. ^_^

Then came my final class, graduation, and moving back to my home state, along with applying to graduate school, so the video simmered on the back burner until I finally sat down to edit the video in mid-November.

As to the actual editing, I decided to not use any digital effects, since I had little enough time to edit the video already, and the fact the they were largely unnecessary to the video. So the only effects in this video are cuts and crossfades, with a very few clips slowed down to about 85% speed to fit a lyric.

I also had to choose whether to cut the song before the instrumental, or to do the entire song. I tried both ways, and eventually decided to keep what I thought was a fairly weak instrumental section because I liked the way the final vocal segment looked. In particular, I liked the final clip, (Actually not from the movie, but from the trailers on Disk 2) which makes the video look a little like a real opening with a title card at the end.

Convention History:
Katsucon 10 – Winner, Judge’s Award
AnimeEvolution 2004 – Winner, Best Fun/Upbeat
Bakuretsucon 2004 – Entrant

Anime – Ah! My Goddess (OVA & Movie)
Song – Styx – Show Me the Way
Completed November 2002
Premiered January 12, 2003
AnimeMusicVideos.org link

When inspiration strikes, sometimes you don’t have the resources to run with it. That was the way this video started out, as I was listening to my older brother’s CD collection for something interesting while at home for the end of summer break. The idea struck halfway through the first verse, and simmered there until I could get back to my apartment at college and start in on it.

I actually had to rebuild the project twice during the month and a half I spent between classes creating this video, both times because I had ripped the movie footage in the wrong aspect ratio.

The instrumentals of this one are, hands down, the weakest part of the video. I’m still not completely happy with several of them, though the long one in the middle of the song, which shows every character in the series I’m fairly proud of.

This video is also the first video since Corbies that I extensively used digital effects, and I like to think that they worked quite well in the video.

I originally planned to debut this video at NekoCon V, which would have been my 1-year anniversary of submitting videos to cons (Rouge’s Prayer at NekoCon FLASH), but somewhere between them being received and the compilation of the contest tape, it got lost, so I decided to keep it under wraps until Ohayocon two months later.

At the urging of a friend of mine who was going to AnimeEvolution, I sent this video there as well.

Convention History:
Ohayocon 3 – Winner, Best Drama
AnimeEvolution 2003 – Winner, Best Drama/Romance; Best Artistic; Judge’s Best Overall