Category: AMV

I’ve always been a fan of musical theater, and especially enjoy obscure ones. For a short while, I had an XM radio subscription, and the On Broadway channel introduced me to quite a few shows I hadn’t known of before, including First Date.

I had just finished watching My Love Story a few weeks before sitting down to edit my video for AWA Pro, and the idea of putting the innocent-seeming Yamato into the role of Allison made me laugh, and having Sunakawa available to play the role of Gabe worked out well, too.

The ending unfortunately confused a bunch of people that didn’t have the context of the rest of the show, but the majority of the video amused several of the other viewers, so overall I consider it fairly successful. It got one finalist nomination, but didn’t win anything.

Anime - My Love Story!
Audio - Cast of "First Date" - Allison's Theme #1
Completed September 2019

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After finishing Day of Flight for Animethon, I had a day or two before the deadline for Animethon, so I decided to see if I could quickly edit together this pairing that had gotten stuck in my head after hamstar138 gave me a copy of the Finding Neverland Broadway soundtrack.

I’ve made a Patema Inverted video with a song about being upside down before, but I like this one’s pacing and structure a bit better. 

This also was entered at Animethon 2019, but didn’t make the finals.

Anime - Patema Inverted
Music - When the World Turned Upside Down (from "Finding Neverland")
Completed July 2019

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While Rakka was the main character of Haibane Renmei, it always felt to me that the series was Reki's story. It told the tale of how she became the support along the path for so many others without becoming a doormat, and how she had to make that realization about herself to embark on her Day of Flight.

I've used the soundtrack to Pippin in a video before, and I've always loved the soaring optimism Pippin displays in Morning Glow, that a better future is coming soon. The parallel with Reki's early-morning final departure was what stuck with me for this video.

I'm not sure I expressed all of that clearly in the editing, but that's what I was going for.

This was entered at Animethon 2019, but didn't make the finals.

Anime - Haibane Renmei
Music - John Rubenstein - Morning Glow (from "Pippin")
Completed July 2019

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About a week before BasharOfTheAges’s birthday in 2017, I had the silly idea of doing a parody MEP project for him, so I reached out to several other local editors - drewaconclusion, hamstar138, potsandpants, and Samiti - who agreed to help out and made fun segments for it. 

Bashar got a decent laugh out of the result, which was the goal.

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
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I've always loved using very obscure sources in AMVs, as a way of introducing something new to viewers. I stumbled across Momotaro: Sacred Sailors because of an ad on Facebook, of all places, and decided that a 1942 propaganda film was exactly the sort of obscure I wanted to try to make a video to.

The audio was also something of a lucky find. I first heard “Oh How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning'' from my grandfather as a little kid, and only learned that it was originally an Irving Berlin showtune from his This Is the Army revue more than 25 years later. The fact that the musical was also a propaganda piece from 1942 was a nice bit of accidental symmetry.

I had hoped there were more scenes in barracks to use for mentions of sleeping, but all in all, it came together pretty well. It generated a bunch of “I don’t really know what to make of this” responses at AWA Pro 2017 and got a finalist nomination in the Best Musical category, but didn’t win.

Anime - Momotaro: Sacred Sailors
Audio - Irving Berlin - Oh, How I hate to Get Up in the Morning (from "In the Army)
Completed August 2017

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This was my personal mini-tribute to the original DDR Project MEP, in honor of its 15th anniversary.

We showed the MEP at a small one-day convention I helped at, and watching the many memorable tracks, "Upside Down" stuck in my head afterward. I had just recently watched Patema Inverted the week before, and the combination was too much fun to pass up.

I originally planned to use the full length song, but I realized while scrubbing through the movie that there wasn't enough upbeat footage to carry the whole song, so I fell back to the game-length version instead.

The title is a math joke, alluding to how the two leads fall in opposite directions.

It was cute fun, and got a decent reaction at AWA Pro 2016.

Anime - Patema Inverted
Audio - COO COO - Upside Down
Completed August 2016

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This was my first video in almost two years, as after changing jobs and moving two states away, my free time was a lot more constrained than I had anticipated.

I’ve always liked Broadway musicals, and Wicked has spent a long time on my rotating playlist (I did get to see the touring show in 2009, and hope to catch it again if it’s back in my area again).

After watching Toradora!, even though I had really disliked Ami through most of the series, the parallels of Ami’s and Elpheba’s character arcs struck me. Elpheba’s reprise of “I’m Not That Girl” in particular felt like a good fit for a video.

I did end up cutting part of the song that didn’t quite feel like it fit, but the final result I thought was pretty nice.

Anime - Toradora!
Audio - Idina Menzel - I'm Not That Girl (from "Wicked")
Completed August 2015

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
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This video was inspired by Aimoaio’s excellent video Enchanted, which introduced me to both Kimi ni Tokoke and Owl City.

The idea with this video started in the name. I wanted to show both how Sawako adapted to her changing circumstances, and how those circumstances were portrayed in the manga, anime, and live-action movie adaptations of the story.

Conveniently, the first season of the anime and the live-action movie ended at about the same narrative point, so which events got shown were dictated by the movie (as it had the shortest running time and fewest events).

The manga portions of this one are the weakest in my opinion, and I found a new respect for manga music video editors while working on those sections. It’s a lot of really hard work to make an engaging video out of still images.

This video got nominated as a finalist in the Romance category at AWA 2014 and won Best Romance at Another Anime Con 2014.

Anime - Kimi ni Todoke
Audio - Owl City - Meteor Shower
Completed August 2014

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This is an idea that lurked in my head for more than eight years before I finally managed to put it together. I was learning about DVD authoring for my job, and got interested in how menus and branching worked. That led to thinking about taking advantage of that for a video.

It went through many, many iterations and source combinations in my head before I settled on the 80’s-retro feel (Full Metal Panic, Macross Plus, Evangelion, and many other sources were considered at various points).

For the audio, I settled on mostly using tracks from a set of royalty-free collections I had recently picked up, since it had options for 60-second versions of most of the tracks. That felt like a good length for each segment, as that would yield about a 3-minute run each time through the video. I also decided to use the same musical clip for each Bad End segment for continuity. For that, I used the Game Over clip from a video game I loved playing in high school, Renegade: Battle for Jacob’s Star, which I heard many, many times while playing.

I always intended this video for the Anime Weekend Atlanta Masters contest, since the format made it pretty much impossible to play anywhere else. It didn’t win, but did generate a decent amount of positive commentary. I did also send it to Anime Expo 2014 as a challenge, but it was disqualified under the “extreme difficulty of playback” rule.

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link

This was my entry for Otohiko's group in the CDVV Iron Chef competition. After hearing the various songs, this was the one that stuck in my head, and I was thinking of Space as a possible theme. 

Thinking about the idea for a while, I remembered the Saturn V launch from Battle Athletes and came up with the idea of incorporating NASA archive footage as a contrast, paired up with scenes from anime that were inspired by the shot, and I was actually surprised at how well it worked. Finding the lunar surface shots from Rocket Girls was a lucky thing, I'll admit, as I hadn't watched the series yet. 

I'm not entirely happy with the "future" segment, since that was the last one I did and was running out of time to submit, but it still works fairly well.

Anime - Banner Of The Stars, Battle Athletes, Bubblegum Crisis 2032, Crest Of The Stars, Gunbuster, Millennium Actress, Moonlight Mile, Project A-Ko, Rocket Girls, Starship Operators, Voices Of A Distant Star, NASA Footage
Music - Explosions in the Sky - So Long, Lonesome
Completed February 2013

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