AMV

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

I was worried that I wouldn’t finish Trí Scéal in time for the AWA Accolades deadline, so I had this idea hanging around in my head as a backup idea that I could put together very quickly just in case. When I actually finished with about a day to go to the deadline, I decided to try and get it done as a second entry.

I first heard Jay Foreman perform one verse of the song in a YouTube video (an episode of The Park Bench with Matt Gray where Jay subbed in for Tom Scott), and was what I intended to use before I had bought copies of Jay’s album, which included a version with four verses. I thought that was probably a bit much, and cut it down to just the first and last verses for the video.

For video, I just ripped every 16:9 BluRay in my collection I could think of that might include someone writing, and scrubbed through looking for workable scenes. I decided early on that I’d only use one shot from each source, so I had to come up with quite a few. I actually spent far longer just waiting for discs to rip than I did actually assembling the video.

It wasn’t until I was putting clips on the timeline that I noticed some of the writing was very frantic, and decided on the fly to have the franticness build as the video went on, which made the final video far better than my original plan of just throwing everything on the timeline and hoping it flowed.

The title is a cheap math joke, because it’s the mathematical names for the two shapes that a Spirograph draws – hypotrochoids if the moving wheel is rolling around the inside the stationary wheel, epitrochoids if the moving wheel is rolling around the outside of the stationary one.

It got a good reaction from the other competitors, and was nominated as a finalist in the Trailer/Parody category (because several people thought it was from an actual commercial for Spirograph).

Video – Emma: A Victorian Romance, My Love Story!, Anthem of the Heart, Spy x Family, A Silent Voice, Garden of Words, I Want to Eat Your Pancreas, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Monthly Girls Nozaki-kun, The Wind Rises, Your Name, Weathering With You, Clannad, Gourmet Girl Graffiti, Chobits, Porco Rosso, Wolf Children, Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid, Penguin Highway, From Up on Poppy Hill, She The Ultimate Weapon, Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya, K-on!, Royal Space Force Honneamise, Wotakoi, Summer Wars, Little Witch Academia
Audio – Jay Foreman – Spirograph
Completed September 2023

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link

Back in 2014, I was driving through very rural northern Vermont late one evening for work, and wanted to follow the Bruins-Canadiens playoff game that was happening that same night. The only station I could find was a French-language station out of Montreal, and after the game, they went back to their usual music format. “Jamais Trop Tard,” a very new release at the time, was the first song they played, and it caught my attention very strongly. I managed to use Shazam to find the actual song title, and spent the next eight years looking for a series to use for it.

A friend loaned me a copy of Emma to watch as a possible series to use after I asked for suggestions, and it fit better than I expected.

I specifically wanted to send this video to Canadian conventions, and in particular Otakuthon in Montreal, though sadly it didn’t make the finals at any of the ones I sent it to. I did get several compliments from people who did see it and fans of Emma, though.

Video – Emma: A Victorian Romance
Audio – Marie-Mai feat. Jonas – Jamais Trop Tard
Completed July 2023

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link