Month: March 2022

In 2012, Another Anime Con held a contest for original videos on the theme “What Would You Do For a Box of Pocky?” with the prize of 50 boxes of Pocky. I had a silly idea for a Metal Gear parody, so I spent the next few weeks gathering the props and costumes and shot everything over two late nights at the public access TV station I was working at, with the editing and effects taking another few days.

It won the contest, but sadly pretty much by default, as there were only two entries, and the other was a no-effort joke.

I’m still pretty happy with how it came out, even if I cringe at my horrible cheesy acting, and it taught me a lot about making original shorts.

YouTube Link

After seeing the episode “Read It and Weep,” the combination of Rainbow Dash and Reading Rainbow wouldn’t leave my head, so I quickly knocked it together in time to send it to AWA Pro 2012.

I also sent it to Youmacon 2012, where it got a positive reaction, but didn’t win anything.

Anime - My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic
Music - Tina Fabrique - Reading Rainbow Theme Song
Completed August 2012

YouTube Link

I picked up a Blu-Ray of The Secret of Kells on a whim when I saw it on a shelf of Academy Award nominees at a store, and fell in love with the movie. When I decided to try editing a video to it, I chose to play with the storyline, making Brendan’s story more of a quest brought to him by Aesling rather than how the movie actually plays out.

The modifications worked out nicely, and the video won Best Storytelling at AWA Pro 2012.

Video Source - The Secret of Kells
Music - Yasunori Mitsuda - Time's Scar (from Chrono Cross)
Completed July 2012

YouTube Link

This video was my second video to create a composite character out of multiple series, though not quite as successfully as my first. 

I'm a big fan of soccer and played it recreationally for a few years (usually as goalkeeper because nobody else wanted to), so I wanted to do a video celebrating the love of the game, from the young kids that get inspired by watching the pros, through the junior and senior leagues, up through becoming the pros they once watched. With Euro 2012 happening that summer, I felt it was a perfect time to finally put it together. 

This one rattled around in my brain with several different songs (and far more sources) for quite a while before I actually sat down to edit it. It was an "almost in desperation" edit before the Connecticon deadline as two other ideas I was working on fell apart in the two weeks before the deadline, so this one is a bit of a rush job, but it holds together pretty well, I think.

Anime - Hungry Heart Wild Striker, Gold Kids, Knight in the Area, Giant Killing
Music - Jerry Goldsmith - Take Us Out (from "Rudy")
Completed July 2012

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link

This is a video that lurked in the back of my mind ever since I listened to the soundtrack for How to Train Your Dragon. The song moves through such a clear narrative arc that it started suggesting stories to me even before I saw the movie. 

I've wanted to do a story of making a composite character from many different series for a while, and this song lent itself very well to that idea. I settled on using mostly Ghibli and Satoshi Kon movies because of the consistency and similarity of the character designs between them. 

The age breakdowns were mostly picked for what age the characters appeared to be, though the selection of 76 as the final age was a very deliberate, personal choice for me. In the summer of 2007, one of my grandfathers passed away at the age of 76, so I picked that age as a subtle personal nod. 

The pacing is also fairly deliberate, since as I remember it, when I was younger, days seemed to pass very slowly, with little change. Now that I'm in my thirties, there are times where it feels like I blink and miss a week. So I chose to make the younger time periods longer, and the older ones shorter, until the final section where the ending of the story needed to be told. 

When I submitted this to Anime Boston, it didn't make the finals, which depressed me quite a bit, given how personal this video was to me. Speaking to a couple prescreeners a few months later, they told me that they had liked the video, but were a bit confused by the age indicators until the end of the video, which were just the numbers in the version I had sent. I took that feedback and added the word "Age" to each indicator before sending it to AWA Expo, which apparently helped clear up the confusion, since it won "Best Storytelling" there, and later "Best Drama" at AAC.

Anime - Tokyo Godfathers, My Neighbor Totoro, Whisper of the Heart, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Kiki's Delivery Service, Paprika, Perfect Blue, Ponyo, The Cat Returns, Millennium Actress
Music - John Powell - Forbidden Friendship
Completed March 2012

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link