Category: AMV

I got introduced to this movie by a GIF on Twitter talking about the animation and how it had inspired the look of Samurai Jack. After watching it, I decided that I needed to make an AMV using it, because it fit my wheelhouse of "obscure old-school source" so well.

After hunting for a useful song for quite a while, I ended up falling back on my old standby of "epic theatrical music" for this one. I originally intended to use several of the fight scenes from across the movie, but I couldn't get the narrative to flow very well, so I cut the idea back to only using the epic final battle sequence against the eight-headed dragon.

It came across all right, but I'd like to revisit the movie again someday and use more of the really cool animation sequences, especially the fire demon fight.

Anime - The Little Prince and the Eight-Headed Dragon (Wanpaku Ouji no Orochi Taiji)
Music - Epic Score - Their Fight is Our Fight
Completed July 2022

YouTube Link
AnimeMusicVideos.org Link

I’ve been a fan of the .hack franchise since the very beginning, with .hack//SIGN, and I’ve wanted to make a video using the original quartet of games for quite a few years, but couldn’t find the right song.

A friend of mine suggested a song by Blackmore’s Night as a possibility, but it didn’t quite feel right to me. But the sound of the group definitely caught my ear, so I listened to a few of their albums to see what else they’d done, and stumbled across The Circle. I’d noticed as the various entries of the .hack franchise continued that there were a common group of plot beats that appeared as the setup and introduction for most of them, so the idea of a cyclical story using Aura as the viewpoint character for the song became the base of my idea for the video.

My original idea was to use all of the video incarnations of the story in chronological order (including SIGN, Legend of the Twilight Bracelet, Roots, and Quantum), but I realized that that would result in alternating between cel animation and CG for each entry in the series, so I decided to focus on the CG entries.

To get the footage, the G.U. movie and Beyond the World movie were easy (just ripping Blu-Rays), and the G.U. games thankfully had recently had a remastered re-release on Steam, so the video files were much easier to get than the PS2 versions would have been. The original games were much more difficult, since the cutscenes mostly weren’t stored as video files, but were rendered in-engine. To get them, I ended up using a PS2 emulator configured to upscale the raw frames and then dump them to a video file. Thankfully, I also had an Action Replay to copy my 100% complete file from my actual memory card to the emulator and unlock all of the cutscenes so I didn’t have to play through the whole series on the emulator (I had over 125 hours of play on the save file).

I also had to decide how to handle the various aspect ratios in the footage. Luckily, the three distinct periods of the video were all consistent with each other (the original games were 4:3, the G.U. movie and games were both 16:9, and the Beyond the World movie was 21:9), so I decided to keep each of them at their native ratios and animate letter/pillarboxing as needed to keep the video project at 16:9, which worked out pretty well, in my opinion.

Execution-wise, I think this video is pretty good, though the pacing, particularly of the first segment, could be better - it’s a rather slow introduction.

This got a decent reaction from several other editors in AWA Pro 2021, but ultimately didn’t receive any finals nominations.

Anime - .hack Franchise (.hack//INFECTION, .hack//MUTATION, .hack//OUTBREAK, .hack//QUARANTINE, .hack//G.U. Trilogy, .hack//G.U. Last Recode, .hack//Beyond the World
Audio - Blackmoor's Night - The Circle
Completed September 2021

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link

This was my entry to the second half of AMV Sashimi’s Iron Remix 2 event in 2021. The idea was that in a few hours, one editor would edit a video, Iron Chef-style. Another editor would be given just the audio track (no video) and the title of the video to use as the basis for a new video they would have a week to edit.

I was given the audio and title from Opner’s Just the Good Times video, and I still had I Want to Eat Your Pancreas ripped from the first Iron Remix handy, so that’s what I went with as my combo, focussing on the happy moments of the movie and avoiding the heavier dramatic moments.

It was a fun one to make and came out pretty nicely, I think.

Anime - I Want to Eat Your Pancreas
Audio - Ichika Nito - When you hit 1million subscribers
Completed July 2021

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link

This was my entry to the first half of AMV Sashimi’s Iron Remix 2 event in 2021. The idea was that in a few hours, one editor would edit a video, Iron Chef-style. Another editor would be given just the audio track (no video) and the title of the video to use as the basis for a new video they would have a week to edit.

A conversation in Discord about Cool Runnings had had the track from the final run in the movie stuck in my head for several weeks, so I decided to do a sports video and chose the Battle Athletes OVA for my video source.

This was pretty rushed, even for an Iron Chef video, but I think it at least came out pretty coherently.

The audio and title were remixed in the second half of the event by Katranat for their video.

Anime - Battle Athletes OVA
Audio - Hans Zimmer - The Walk Home (from Cool Runnings)
Completed July 2021

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link

This was my entry to the second half of AMV Sashimi’s Iron Remix event in 2021. The idea was that in a few hours, one editor would edit a video, Iron Chef-style. Another editor would be given just the video track (no audio) and a theme to use as the basis for a new video they would have a week to edit.

I was given the video to Troubleclef’s “Battletits” and the theme of Action as the base for my video.

Since the source video was so short, I needed an even shorter piece of music, which took me quite a while to find. I ended up settling on a snippet from the soundtrack to The Wizard of Speed and Time.

It’s not my best work, but with the limited source and time, it still came out pretty well.

Anime - Keijo!
Audio - John Massari - Wizard Run (from The Wizard of Speed and Time)
Completed April 2021

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link

This was my entry to the first half of AMV Sashimi’s Iron Remix event in 2021. The idea was that in a few hours, one editor would edit a video, Iron Chef-style. Another editor would be given just the video track (no audio) and a theme to use as the basis for a new video they would have a week to edit.

The audio for this one was a lucky find. I had thrown every audio file on my computer under 3 minutes long onto a playlist to see what sparked inspiration, and on that list was a shortened version of Night Ranger’s “Goodbye” I had made back in 2013 for a possible AMV that I ended up never starting. Since the original version of the song is 4:30 long, it never would have been on the list of possibilities without that shortened version. I actually went back to the original and made a differently-shortened version for the video.

For the video, with the short time to edit, I wanted to use a movie to reduce the amount of scene hunting I’d have to do, and had recently rewatched I Want to Eat Your Pancreas, which fit very well with the mood of the song. 

Overall, I like it, especially for an Iron Chef video made in about three hours.

It was eventually remixed in the second half of the event by Future_Vantas using the theme “Trailer” into their Love Story Trailer video.

Anime - I Want to Eat Your Pancreas
Audio - Night Ranger - Goodbye
Completed March 2021

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link

I usually really like the soundtracks to most Disney movies, but Olaf’s song in the original Frozen was one that I really didn’t like. When the sequel came out, I wasn’t looking forward to whatever song he was going to get, but I was very pleasantly surprised that it was actually quite fun. 

Listening to the soundtrack without the movie, the first thing that popped into my head for Olaf’s terrified scream was Shinji’s similar scream in the fight against Ramiel, and the rest of the video grew from that one scene.

This has been my most successful video in contests in quite a few years, picking up several wins:

RICE 2021 - Winner, Sh*t’s Rough Award
Kumoricon 2021 - Winner, Best Guilty Pleasures
Anime Los Angeles 2022 - Winner, Best Comedy/Humor and Audience Choice

Anime - Neon Genesis Evangelion
Audio - Josh Gad - When I Am Older (from Frozen 2)
Completed February 2021

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link

In August 2020, I lost my very elderly cat Crystal. A few months later, I was still badly missing her, and the AWA Pro deadline was approaching, so my brain started going to video ideas about cats. The idea that stuck out was Chi’s Sweet Home and how the kitten becomes a full member of the Yamada family. Pets truly are members of families, and losing one hurts just as much as losing a human member.

This is a simple and heartfelt video that has a lot of personal meaning to me, and I’m glad people seemed to pick up on that in the judging for AWA Pro 2020.

Anime - Chi's Sweet Home, Chi's New Address
Audio - Magome Togoshi - Kaisouroku (from Air)
Completed October 2020

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link

Round 4's theme was "The Magic School Bus," where we had to present something educational.

I grew up with Schoolhouse Rock, so as soon as the theme was announced, I knew I'd use one of their songs. I settled on Nouns  partly because it seemed like it could work as a direct narration (many of the others are a bit too specific lyrically) as well as being one of my absolute favorites.

For the video, I tried to think of anime that involved a train robbery, and the only one I could remember was the episode of Rurouni Kenshin with the ridiculous horse jump, so that was what I went with, adding the "Science Lesson" frame from Gunbuster for the explanation pieces in homage to the frame in the original video.

People got a good laugh out of it, so I'm glad it worked.

Anime - Rurouni Kenshin, Gunbuster
Audio - Schoolhouse Rock - A Noun is a Person, Place, or Thing
Completed October 2020

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link

The theme for Round 3 of POE 2020 was "Tis the Season" where editors were supposed to highlight a holiday or season.

I had just seen the Christmas episode of a show the day before, so I landed on using the classic Christmas carol "The Most Wonderful Time of the Year," set to as many Christmas episodes as I could find in my collection.

I generally hate Christmas music because of how overplayed so much of it is for two solid months of the year, so this was a hard video to edit. It still comes off pretty well, and it got some good comments from some of the other participants.

Anime - Various Anime
Audio - Andy Miller - The Most Wonderful Time of the Year
Completed October 2020

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link