Month: January 2024

The theme for the third round of Shabu Showdown 2023 was "Spectacular Settings," where editors were given one week to edit a video focusing on the scenery or setting of a source, rather than the plot or characters.

I immediately decided to use the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings movies, because of all the huge sweeping establishing shots in the films. The song was a lot harder to come up with, and I reached out for suggestions, and ended up getting the excellent song I ended up using from a link provided by VioletSkies.

I was also dealing with several real life things outside the event at the time, and I was worried I wouldn't be able to finish the whole song, so I edited a short version of the video that ended with the end of the first movie, just to have something to submit in case I ran out of time. I also decided once I started the second segment to focus just on Sam and Frodo's path through the films for narrative simplicity, though that did mean giving up the initial inspiration shot for the video (the epic long helicopter shot of Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli running across the landscape in pursuit of the Orc army).

In the end, it came together much better than I initially thought it would, and was given the "Epic Fantasy" coordinator's award at the end of the event.

Video - Lord of the Rings movie trilogy
Audio - Tommee Profitt x MILCK - BEYOND
Completed November 2023

YouTube Link

The theme for the second round of Shabu Showdown 2023 was 20th Century Time Capsule - editors had a week to create a video with a video or audio source (and preferably both) originating between 1901 and 2000.

My original idea was really dark, with Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust" to the 2000 movie Battle Royale, which I decided was a bit too much for this sort of event. I did like the idea of using the song, though, and so I started looking through my collection of discs when I remembered Dragon's Lair, which fit the song really well, and still was lighthearted enough that it felt more appropriate.

All of the footage segments were very short (usually under 60 seconds, with the deaths even shorter), so I divided them into three buckets: "successes" which I used for most of the first section of the video, "deaths" which filled most of the remainder of the video, and "skeleton bounce," which was all of the variants of the game over animation. If I remember correctly, there are 27 different versions with the same animation over different backgrounds. I ended up only using it for the final segment of the video, and synched up several of them to cut between on the beat for that final shot.

People definitely enjoyed it, and a few suggested I send it to events that accept video game and western animation videos, which I may do.

Video - Dragon's Lair
Audio - Queen - Another One Bites the Dust
Completed November 2023

YouTube Link

The theme for the first round of Shabu Showdown 2023 was Owl House Covens - editors had a week to create a video illustrating one of the covens from the show Owl House. The only one that sparked an idea quickly for me was the Oracle coven, which dealt with fortune-telling, clairvoyance, divination, etc. 

I had recently been thinking about Sailor Moon, and remembered Rei (Sailor Mars) and her divinations using the sacred fire in her home temple, but it took me longer than I expected to find the footage I needed. I had forgotten how much was in the Doom Tree arc and had been looking in the S season instead. I interspersed the Sailor Moon footage with footage from a bunch of other series and movies that showed the aftermath of major natural disasters to indicate what she was seeing visions of.

For audio, I went back to my familiar well of production music and Two Steps From Hell, which worked for the video, but I decided after this round that I wouldn't use TSFH for the rest of the event, wanting to break out of that familiar rut.

Reactions to it were pretty positive, and I'm pretty happy with the result.

Video - Sailor Moon (original and R), Tokyo Magnitude 8.0, Your Name, Weathering With You, Princess Mononoke, Millennium Actress, The Wind Rises, Ponyo
Audio - Two Steps From Hell - Mercy in Darkness
Completed November 2023

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link