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