Month: March 2022

Inflection Point

After finishing Day of Flight for Animethon, I had a day or two before the deadline for Animethon, so I decided to see if I could quickly edit together this pairing that had gotten stuck in my head after hamstar138 gave me a copy of the Finding Neverland Broadway soundtrack.

I’ve made a Patema Inverted video with a song about being upside down before, but I like this one’s pacing and structure a bit better. 

This also was entered at Animethon 2019, but didn’t make the finals.

Anime - Patema Inverted
Music - When the World Turned Upside Down (from "Finding Neverland")
Completed July 2019

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link

Day of Flight

While Rakka was the main character of Haibane Renmei, it always felt to me that the series was Reki's story. It told the tale of how she became the support along the path for so many others without becoming a doormat, and how she had to make that realization about herself to embark on her Day of Flight.

I've used the soundtrack to Pippin in a video before, and I've always loved the soaring optimism Pippin displays in Morning Glow, that a better future is coming soon. The parallel with Reki's early-morning final departure was what stuck with me for this video.

I'm not sure I expressed all of that clearly in the editing, but that's what I was going for.

This was entered at Animethon 2019, but didn't make the finals.

Anime - Haibane Renmei
Music - John Rubenstein - Morning Glow (from "Pippin")
Completed July 2019

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link

Anime Boston 2019 AMV Contest Opening

I was absolutely buried in several other editing projects when I needed to put together the opening for Anime Boston 2019’s Tales of the Shogunate year.

I ended up just slapping together a very simple series of clips from the first three Lone Wolf and Cub movies and overlaying the instructions and warnings. Simple and effective, but not very engaging. I’ll have to step up for next year.

YouTube Link

The Best Game You Can Name

I grew up in a hockey-crazy area, and I’ve always loved watching it, but didn’t have the time or money to play growing up. When I moved to Massachusetts, I started attending college hockey games regularly, which rekindled my interest in the game and eventually led to me joining a beginner’s adult league, first as a skater, then later as a goalie. I was finishing up my first season as a goalie when the time to start editing for AWA Pro came around, so I had hockey on the brain.

There are a lot of great hockey movies that have been made over the years, so I decided pairing a bunch of them with a classic Canadian song about hockey was an amusing combination. Balancing the action with the storytelling of the song was a challenge, but it came out quite nicely in the end.

Also amusing was when the other AWA Pro editors saw it, they were convinced that a Canadian editor had made it. It got a finalist nomination in Best Live Action, but didn’t win the category.

Video Source - D2: The Mighty Ducks; Goon; Goon 2; Slap Shot; The Mighty Ducks; Miracle; Mr. Hockey: The Gordie Howe Story; Mystery, Alaska; NHL Playoffs; Sudden Death
Audio - Stompin' Tom Collins - The Hockey Song
Completed August 2018

YouTube Link

Anime Boston 2018 AMV Contest Opening

The theme for Anime Boston 2018 was To The Stars… but I couldn’t come up with any good ideas for an opening that were doable in the time we had before the convention, so I ended up falling back to the structure of the 2015 opening, and pulled out a bunch of images of iconic anime spaceships to pair with the instructions and warnings.

This wasn’t my best effort, but still was pretty nice.

YouTube Link

Reveille

I've always loved using very obscure sources in AMVs, as a way of introducing something new to viewers. I stumbled across Momotaro: Sacred Sailors because of an ad on Facebook, of all places, and decided that a 1942 propaganda film was exactly the sort of obscure I wanted to try to make a video to.

The audio was also something of a lucky find. I first heard “Oh How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning'' from my grandfather as a little kid, and only learned that it was originally an Irving Berlin showtune from his This Is the Army revue more than 25 years later. The fact that the musical was also a propaganda piece from 1942 was a nice bit of accidental symmetry.

I had hoped there were more scenes in barracks to use for mentions of sleeping, but all in all, it came together pretty well. It generated a bunch of “I don’t really know what to make of this” responses at AWA Pro 2017 and got a finalist nomination in the Best Musical category, but didn’t win.

Anime - Momotaro: Sacred Sailors
Audio - Irving Berlin - Oh, How I hate to Get Up in the Morning (from "In the Army)
Completed August 2017

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link

Anime Boston 2017 AMV Contest Opening

2017 marked the 15th edition of Anime Boston, so I wanted to play with that history theme, and looked back at earlier years of openings for this one. The opening for 2006 in particular was ripe for a parody, which is what ended up happening.

Unlike previous years of parodies, I ended up shooting the “modern-day” segments as a solo effort, with the “past” segments taken directly from the 2006 opening. The hockey player segment in particular was an interesting bit to shoot, as I had to be careful not to cross the center line from either position.

YouTube Link

Z-Axis Intersection

This was my personal mini-tribute to the original DDR Project MEP, in honor of its 15th anniversary.

We showed the MEP at a small one-day convention I helped at, and watching the many memorable tracks, "Upside Down" stuck in my head afterward. I had just recently watched Patema Inverted the week before, and the combination was too much fun to pass up.

I originally planned to use the full length song, but I realized while scrubbing through the movie that there wasn't enough upbeat footage to carry the whole song, so I fell back to the game-length version instead.

The title is a math joke, alluding to how the two leads fall in opposite directions.

It was cute fun, and got a decent reaction at AWA Pro 2016.

Anime - Patema Inverted
Audio - COO COO - Upside Down
Completed August 2016

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link

Anime Boston 2016 AMV Contest Opening

Adam decided to hand off being the AMV Contest Coordinator to me after Anime Boston 2015, and suggested this Star Wars parody for 2016 as a nod to the change.

With more time to plan and put together this opening, it came off a lot better than our 2014 effort. We originally planned a lot more digital effects (full lightsaber animation), but ran out of time before the convention to actually do it. It got a lot of laughs at the actual showing, which was our real goal, so we’re pretty happy with it.

YouTube Link