AMV

I had originally planned on only submitting one video to RICE 2025, but about a month before the deadline, Thomas Benjamin Wild, Esq. released a new album, which included a song that immediately sparked an idea that I decided to give a shot. But while I was scrubbing footage for it, I realized that I wouldn’t have enough time to edit it.

As a silver lining, though, I’d been listening to the rest of his albums while scrubbing, and this idea had gotten added to my list, and would be significantly easier to put together, so I pivoted with about three weeks to go before the deadline. And then I came down with pneumonia that put me in bed for more than a week, which was an absolutely miserable experience that I recommend anyone to avoid.

I did manage to get it together just before the deadline, and it did get a good amount of positive reactions from the other editors in RICE.

For such a silly idea, it worked better than I expected, and I had fun making it (once I got over being so sick).

Video – VTuber Legend: How I Went Viral After Forgetting to Turn Off My Stream
Audio – Thomas Benjamin Wild, Esq. – Pants Drunk
Completed February 2025

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link

Back in 2004, norskotaku released their video Illuminations I: Reflections of a Goddess, an almost-10-minute-long epic using the Ah! My Goddess movie and the “Reflections of Earth” segment from EPCOT’s Illuminations fireworks show, and I absolutely loved the video. They included in their video description that they planned to do a second video, also using the Ah! My Goddess movie paired with the “We Go On” section of Illuminations.

20 years later, that first video turned out to be the last one norskotaku would release (as of 2025, at least), but it had stuck with me to the point that I’d bought the audio CD for Illuminations and even made my so-far-only trip to EPCOT at Disney World to catch the fireworks show before it closed in 2019 (barely avoiding getting hit by Hurricane Dorian by only one day).

In the intervening two decades, Ah! My Goddess had also gotten two seasons of TV series and an OVA, so I decided that I wanted to both close the circle and pay tribute to the original video by making a video using the “We Go On” segment, but with the newer series instead of the movie.

Unfortunately, the period of time I had to edit it for AWA 2025’s Accolades competition directly overlapped with the preparation period for Bakuretsu Con 2025, where I was the coordinator for the AMV Contest – in fact, the AWA submission deadline was on the convention’s opening Friday. The later portions of the video ended up disappointingly rushed, and were actually edited in my hotel room at Bakuretsu Con Thursday night and Friday morning before I started my con day. I want to go back and revise those portions of the video someday, but I’ve changed primary editing programs in the meantime (from Adobe Premiere to Davinci Resolve), so converting the timeline will take some effort to set up.

While I’m disappointed in the result, I did enjoy making this one, and hopefully the revised-someday-version will be better.

Video – Ah! My Goddess TV
Audio – Kellie Coffey – We Go On (from EPCOT’s Illuminations)
Completed October 2024

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link

One of my other hobbies besides AMVs is collecting retro video games, which is how I first discovered the existence of Eight Man, which has an also-obscure game for the Neo Geo. The series was originally broadcast in 1963/64, and is the origin of Japan’s first cyborg superhero, predating Kamen Rider by about eight years. A few years ago, I saw a post on then-Twitter announcing that the series was getting a BluRay release in Japan, and on a whim, I decided to jump on it, and it sat in my collection waiting for an idea to strike.

Inspiration finally struck right after the deadline for RICE 2024, and just before the deadline for Sakuracon, when I stumbled across a copy of the Fleischer Superman shorts in a store and the Superman/Eight Man parallel jumped into my head. I listened to quite a few different Superman themes to figure out which one fit best, and settled on the Lois & Clark version, partially because I could use the original opening as a reference to make a shot-for-shot parody, since I wanted to send something new to Sakuracon and only had a few days to put it together.

I managed to find the matching fonts from the original L&C opening for the credits, and also put the accurate matching credits for Eight Man (though with character names instead of actor names). There were a few shots I had to stretch a bit to find a match to the original shots (especially for some of the Lois shots), but mostly managed to find something that was close enough to work.

This was fun to make, and I want to use the series again someday.

Video – Eight Man
Audio – Jay Gruska – Lois & Clark Main Theme
Completed February 2024

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link

This video probably holds my personal record for the longest time between initial idea and actually editing the video. I’ve found notes about this idea in text files dating back to at least 2005, so it’s 19 years old minimum. I had actually completely forgotten about it for quite a while, until I was going through some old hard drives and found one of my old lists of potential ideas.

The song had a lot of strong potential for using either Utena or Anthy as the viewpoint character, so I’d originally intended to do this as two separate videos, with working titles of “Ravine: Utena Face” and “Ravine: Anthy Face.” After finding the old list and pulling the idea out of mothballs, I decided to do a single video, side-by-side with synched edits that would be in parallel for some sections.

I edited the Utena side first, then duplicated the timeline and replaced each edit clip-by-clip for the Anthy side, so that all of the edits and transitions would retain the same timing. I had to do some adjustments for where I’d used a native cut or fade, but overall, it was a thankfully straightforward process.

There are places I wish I’d matched the direction of camera movement between the two sides a bit better, but overall, I enjoyed how this one turned out.

Video – Revolutionary Girl Utena
Audio – Ace of Base – Ravine
Completed February 2024

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link

An editor friend of mine made an observation to me after AWA 2023 that I never edited with current sources, so it was sometimes easy to pick me out in blind contests. It was accurate – I’m usually very behind on watching things, given my already-huge backlog, but I wanted to deliberately defy their expectations for the next big blind contest, RICE in 2024.

Unusually, I actually watched Overtake! as it was coming out, so it was only a few months old when I started editing the video. I’ve been an F1 fan for a few years, so the iconic opening theme that includes the car engines as part of the music seemed like a perfect pairing. I went with the opening size version of the song rather than the full length version, since I didn’t think I could sustain the energy needed for three and a half minutes with the available footage, but I think that also ended up biting me later when I ran out of song for the finale and had to rush the conclusion. I wish I’d been able to find a happy medium between them, but my audio editing skills couldn’t find good cut points to shorten the longer version.

The length also ended up biting me in a couple of cases, as it was too short for many contests’ main categories, but also wasn’t an opening parody or a commercial.

Overall, this wasn’t a bad effort, and I’m glad to have edited a video to yet another series that felt heavily overlooked.

Video – Overtake!
Audio – Brian Tyler – F1 Main Theme
Completed January 2024

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link