Category: Videos

Video announcements

…And Fancy Free (Project OrgEditor 2020 Round 1)

The theme for Round 1 of POE 2020 was “Parts of the Body.”

I had the idea several years ago of doing a multi-source parody of the opening title sequence from the movie Footloose, which fit the theme perfectly. With the time restriction, though, I went looking for the source that had the best variety of foot and leg shots and landed on Welcome to the Ballroom.

It got a decent reaction from the judges, and I enjoyed making it, so I’ll count that as a success.

Anime - Welcome to the Ballroom
Audio - Kenny Loggins - Footloose
Completed October 2020

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link

Inner Dialogue

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

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link

Inflection Point

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

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link

Day of Flight

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

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link

Anime Boston 2019 AMV Contest Opening

I was absolutely buried in several other editing projects when I needed to put together the opening for Anime Boston 2019’s Tales of the Shogunate year.

I ended up just slapping together a very simple series of clips from the first three Lone Wolf and Cub movies and overlaying the instructions and warnings. Simple and effective, but not very engaging. I’ll have to step up for next year.

YouTube Link

The Best Game You Can Name

I grew up in a hockey-crazy area, and I’ve always loved watching it, but didn’t have the time or money to play growing up. When I moved to Massachusetts, I started attending college hockey games regularly, which rekindled my interest in the game and eventually led to me joining a beginner’s adult league, first as a skater, then later as a goalie. I was finishing up my first season as a goalie when the time to start editing for AWA Pro came around, so I had hockey on the brain.

There are a lot of great hockey movies that have been made over the years, so I decided pairing a bunch of them with a classic Canadian song about hockey was an amusing combination. Balancing the action with the storytelling of the song was a challenge, but it came out quite nicely in the end.

Also amusing was when the other AWA Pro editors saw it, they were convinced that a Canadian editor had made it. It got a finalist nomination in Best Live Action, but didn’t win the category.

Video Source - D2: The Mighty Ducks; Goon; Goon 2; Slap Shot; The Mighty Ducks; Miracle; Mr. Hockey: The Gordie Howe Story; Mystery, Alaska; NHL Playoffs; Sudden Death
Audio - Stompin' Tom Collins - The Hockey Song
Completed August 2018

YouTube Link

Anime Boston 2018 AMV Contest Opening

The theme for Anime Boston 2018 was To The Stars… but I couldn’t come up with any good ideas for an opening that were doable in the time we had before the convention, so I ended up falling back to the structure of the 2015 opening, and pulled out a bunch of images of iconic anime spaceships to pair with the instructions and warnings.

This wasn’t my best effort, but still was pretty nice.

YouTube Link

Reveille

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

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link

Anime Boston 2017 AMV Contest Opening

2017 marked the 15th edition of Anime Boston, so I wanted to play with that history theme, and looked back at earlier years of openings for this one. The opening for 2006 in particular was ripe for a parody, which is what ended up happening.

Unlike previous years of parodies, I ended up shooting the “modern-day” segments as a solo effort, with the “past” segments taken directly from the 2006 opening. The hockey player segment in particular was an interesting bit to shoot, as I had to be careful not to cross the center line from either position.

YouTube Link