Month: March 2022

This was my first video in almost two years, as after changing jobs and moving two states away, my free time was a lot more constrained than I had anticipated.

I’ve always liked Broadway musicals, and Wicked has spent a long time on my rotating playlist (I did get to see the touring show in 2009, and hope to catch it again if it’s back in my area again).

After watching Toradora!, even though I had really disliked Ami through most of the series, the parallels of Ami’s and Elpheba’s character arcs struck me. Elpheba’s reprise of “I’m Not That Girl” in particular felt like a good fit for a video.

I did end up cutting part of the song that didn’t quite feel like it fit, but the final result I thought was pretty nice.

Anime - Toradora!
Audio - Idina Menzel - I'm Not That Girl (from "Wicked")
Completed August 2015

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link

After the issues we had with 2014, I decided on a much simpler plan for Anime Boston 2015’s Mecha and Monsters theme.

I found a huge gigapixel photograph of the Boston skyline at night, and a bunch of high resolution pictures of sci-fi and monster movie toys to pop out from behind the buildings with the instructions and warnings.

The opening worked well, and I’ve used a similar format in other years when time was running short without a better plan.

YouTube Link

For Anime Boston 2015, the theme was Magic & Mischief, so a parody of The Princess Bride seemed appropriate. Unfortunately, lots of scheduling conflicts pushed the only chance we had to shoot this until just a couple weeks before the convention. So Adam, the AMV Contest Coordinator, and I shot this in his kitchen in about three takes with no chance to rehearse or reshoot. And both of us are terrible actors, so the rush job shows.

YouTube Link

In 2013, the local public access station I worked at held its first annual independent horror film festival, and I decided to participate. I didn’t have the time or opportunity to gather a crew, so I ended up doing it as a solo effort.

I was going for an Alien sort of feel, and despite how rushed this was, I still enjoyed making it, and it got a good reaction at the showing.

I shot this in the storage/HVAC space of the building, which lent itself well enough to looking a bit like a space station.

While I had an outline for the plot as I was shooting, I wasn’t sure of the exact dialogue. Also, the HVAC system was incredibly loud, which made recording actual dialogue impossible. So I decided to use a full-face helmet as part of the costume to hide my mouth and recorded all of the audio in post.

For the monster, I decided to never show it, pulling largely from the example of Jaws - the less you see of the monster, the more the audience will fill in with their imagination (which is usually scarier than anything you can create), and it simplifies production immensely. I was inspired by several sci-fi movies and shows for the monster’s perspective shots, most immediately the Autons vision from the first episode of the reboot of Doctor Who.

YouTube Link

This video was inspired by Aimoaio’s excellent video Enchanted, which introduced me to both Kimi ni Tokoke and Owl City.

The idea with this video started in the name. I wanted to show both how Sawako adapted to her changing circumstances, and how those circumstances were portrayed in the manga, anime, and live-action movie adaptations of the story.

Conveniently, the first season of the anime and the live-action movie ended at about the same narrative point, so which events got shown were dictated by the movie (as it had the shortest running time and fewest events).

The manga portions of this one are the weakest in my opinion, and I found a new respect for manga music video editors while working on those sections. It’s a lot of really hard work to make an engaging video out of still images.

This video got nominated as a finalist in the Romance category at AWA 2014 and won Best Romance at Another Anime Con 2014.

Anime - Kimi ni Todoke
Audio - Owl City - Meteor Shower
Completed August 2014

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link

This is an idea that lurked in my head for more than eight years before I finally managed to put it together. I was learning about DVD authoring for my job, and got interested in how menus and branching worked. That led to thinking about taking advantage of that for a video.

It went through many, many iterations and source combinations in my head before I settled on the 80’s-retro feel (Full Metal Panic, Macross Plus, Evangelion, and many other sources were considered at various points).

For the audio, I settled on mostly using tracks from a set of royalty-free collections I had recently picked up, since it had options for 60-second versions of most of the tracks. That felt like a good length for each segment, as that would yield about a 3-minute run each time through the video. I also decided to use the same musical clip for each Bad End segment for continuity. For that, I used the Game Over clip from a video game I loved playing in high school, Renegade: Battle for Jacob’s Star, which I heard many, many times while playing.

I always intended this video for the Anime Weekend Atlanta Masters contest, since the format made it pretty much impossible to play anywhere else. It didn’t win, but did generate a decent amount of positive commentary. I did also send it to Anime Expo 2014 as a challenge, but it was disqualified under the “extreme difficulty of playback” rule.

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link

I joined the staff for Anime Boston in 2013, and took on handling a lot of things surrounding the AMV Contest, including the opening, which had been dormant for several years at that point. The contest opening traditionally had been a parody of a movie scene that includes the various instructions about the rules and warnings for the showing, so for the year’s theme of Tales of Yōkai (Ghosts or Spirits), I decided to do a knockoff of the classic Tales From the Crypt opening.

I shot this at my grandparents' house, which is filled with interesting knicknacks and has a very nice vertical layout that mimicked the path the original opening took. I decided to go up the stairs instead of down because ending in the attic worked better than stopping at the front door. The neat bobbing figures were part of the year’s themed art, and there were exactly the right number to pair one with each instruction.

It took a few tries to time the movement right, so I was pretty exhausted by the time I was done shooting (stairs are great cardio, if you weren’t aware).

YouTube Link

This was my entry for Otohiko's group in the CDVV Iron Chef competition. After hearing the various songs, this was the one that stuck in my head, and I was thinking of Space as a possible theme. 

Thinking about the idea for a while, I remembered the Saturn V launch from Battle Athletes and came up with the idea of incorporating NASA archive footage as a contrast, paired up with scenes from anime that were inspired by the shot, and I was actually surprised at how well it worked. Finding the lunar surface shots from Rocket Girls was a lucky thing, I'll admit, as I hadn't watched the series yet. 

I'm not entirely happy with the "future" segment, since that was the last one I did and was running out of time to submit, but it still works fairly well.

Anime - Banner Of The Stars, Battle Athletes, Bubblegum Crisis 2032, Crest Of The Stars, Gunbuster, Millennium Actress, Moonlight Mile, Project A-Ko, Rocket Girls, Starship Operators, Voices Of A Distant Star, NASA Footage
Music - Explosions in the Sky - So Long, Lonesome
Completed February 2013

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link

At Bakuretsu Con 2012, I participated in a three-way Iron Chef competition, with the additional complication that all of us had to edit our videos using analog equipment - no computers. We were provided several large tubs of commercial VHS tapes as our source material, and three hours to do our work in.

I borrowed most of my equipment from the public access TV station I was working at and got lucky that I didn’t have major technical issues pop up during the editing (one of the others had a very hard time getting his Macrovision breaker to work correctly, and fought with that for almost half the editing time).

My rig included:

Panasonic AG-DS545 SVHS Player
Panasonic AG-DS555 SVHS Recorder (with a scratch on the record head that left a line in everything it recorded)
Panasonic AG-A850 Editing Controller
Panasonic WJ-MX50 Video Mixer

The tapes in the tubs were a mix of subtitled and dubbed releases, and included movies, short OVAs, and a few tapes of a series - usually the first few but not always, so I decided on using Moldiver, which was one of the few complete unsubtitled series available. At six episodes long, it also offered a decent amount of footage without being too long to conveniently scrub and cue.

My final video ended up winning the vote, and it was a fun experience, but I’m very glad we don’t have to edit AMVs like that any more.

Anime - Moldiver
Music - Motoaki F. - Burning Heat! (3 Option Mix)
Completed October 2012

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link

This was a silly, quick video done for AAC's 2012 theme contest, "Year of the Dragon." I wanted a completely silly video, to an obvious song. 

Drawing inspiration from SailorDeath's Camelot video, I picked the SD segments from the Record of Lodoss War TV series as about the silliest possibility for video source, and the far too obvious song of Peter, Paul, & Mary's "Puff the Magic Dragon." 

I kind of hamstrung myself, though, since I remembered far more shots of the tiny Shooting Star than there actually being when I started working through the footage. Still, it was a cute video that got a decent reaction from the audience. 

The title is a silly Latin joke (a direct translation of the song title), and comes from the working title "Draco, Draconis, Draconem," which is itself a silly reference to the first Enchanted Forest Chronicles book, where the main character notes at one point that "she'd always been good at declining nouns."

Anime - Record of Lodoss War: Chronicles of the Heroic Knight
Music - Peter, Paul, & Mary - Puff, the Magic Dragon
Completed October 2012

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link