AMV

Living on the East Coast of the US, I don’t get to go to West Coast conventions very often, but I had the rare opportunity to attend Anime Los Angeles 2026 in conjunction with a trip I was taking to California for other reasons. I wanted to submit something to their contest, but everything I had handy was either ineligible (length, non-anime, freshness time, etc.) or in my opinion, not strong enough to compete, so I needed to come up with a new idea with not very much time to complete it.

Seeing the Commercial category as the most promising option, I went looking for amusing commercials that I might be able to parody. After a decent amount of digging through YouTube, I stumbled back across the FreeCreditReport.com commercials I remembered from the late 2000s. They were catchy, evocative, funny, and ripe for a quick “get in, do the joke, get out” video. Of the nine options (I was surprised at how many there were, too), the “New Car” one immediately reminded me of the first season of Initial D and Itsuki’s lemon of an AE-85 Levin.

There aren’t a lot of episodes it appeared, so scrubbing the footage and assembling the pieces came together pretty quickly.

It did get selected as a finalist and got some laughs from the audience, so I’m counting that as a win for myself. I should do more silly things like this in the future, this was fun to make.

Video – Initial D First Stage
Audio – FreeCreditReport.com “New Car” commercial audio
Completed November 2025

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link

I had an ambitious project planned for AWA Accolades 2025, but also had a lot of travelling scheduled in the two months leading up to the deadline, so that project ended up getting shelved and I had to pivot to an idea that I thought I could complete in the remaining amount of time.

Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 is a series that I’d wanted to do something with ever since seeing AdventLostKaichou’s video Time Falls Away in 2014, and I’d had the I Fight Dragons song “Disaster Hearts” in mind for it for almost as long.

I ended up almost completely excising Yuuki from the video, trying to focus on Mirai and Mari dealing with the trauma of the earthquake rather than Yuuki’s tragic storyline. I also had to cut the song down quite a bit, as the bridge didn’t really fit the mood and flow I was trying for.

Overall, I’m not entirely pleased with how it came out due to how much I was rushing to meet the deadline after pivoting, and I may end up revisiting it in the future, but for now, it’s still not a terrible effort.

Video – Tokyo Magnitude 8.0
Audio – I Fight Dragons – Disaster Hearts
Completed October 2025

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link

I was doing a lot of travelling in the weeks leading up to the AWA Accolades 2025 deadline, and I was getting very worried that I wasn’t going to be able to have anything done for the contest, so I banged together a very short video in two afternoons just to have an entry to submit.

The audio came from a YouTube short that got linked in Tom Scott’s weekly newsletter sometime in early August that made me laugh quite a bit, so I held onto the link just in case.

I thought for a while about what sources I had handy that included a bunch of scenes with cell phone usage, and landed on My Dress-Up Darling, which my wife and I had just finished watching together.

The video ended up getting a good reaction from the other editors in the Accolades contest, which is about the best I could have hoped for with an 8-second-long rush job. It was too short to send anywhere else, sadly (most contests with Shorts categories still have a 15-second minimum), so that was the only place it ended up playing.

Video – My Dress-Up Darling
Audio – Ben Lapidus – August 5, 2025
Completed October 2025

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link

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