Month: December 2023

Hypotrochoids and Epitrochoids

I was worried that I wouldn't finish Trí Scéal in time for the AWA Accolades deadline, so I had this idea hanging around in my head as a backup idea that I could put together very quickly just in case. When I actually finished with about a day to go to the deadline, I decided to try and get it done as a second entry.

I first heard Jay Foreman perform one verse of the song in a YouTube video (an episode of The Park Bench with Matt Gray where Jay subbed in for Tom Scott), and was what I intended to use before I had bought copies of Jay's album, which included a version with four verses. I thought that was probably a bit much, and cut it down to just the first and last verses for the video.

For video, I just ripped every 16:9 BluRay in my collection I could think of that might include someone writing, and scrubbed through looking for workable scenes. I decided early on that I'd only use one shot from each source, so I had to come up with quite a few. I actually spent far longer just waiting for discs to rip than I did actually assembling the video.

It wasn't until I was putting clips on the timeline that I noticed some of the writing was very frantic, and decided on the fly to have the franticness build as the video went on, which made the final video far better than my original plan of just throwing everything on the timeline and hoping it flowed.

The title is a cheap math joke, because it's the mathematical names for the two shapes that a Spirograph draws - hypotrochoids if the moving wheel is rolling around the inside the stationary wheel, epitrochoids if the moving wheel is rolling around the outside of the stationary one.

It got a good reaction from the other competitors, and was nominated as a finalist in the Trailer/Parody category (because several people thought it was from an actual commercial for Spirograph).

Video - Emma: A Victorian Romance, My Love Story!, Anthem of the Heart, Spy x Family, A Silent Voice, Garden of Words, I Want to Eat Your Pancreas, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Monthly Girls Nozaki-kun, The Wind Rises, Your Name, Weathering With You, Clannad, Gourmet Girl Graffiti, Chobits, Porco Rosso, Wolf Children, Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid, Penguin Highway, From Up on Poppy Hill, She The Ultimate Weapon, Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya, K-on!, Royal Space Force Honneamise, Wotakoi, Summer Wars, Little Witch Academia
Audio - Jay Foreman - Spirograph
Completed September 2023

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link