Category: Videos

At Bakuretsu Con 2012, I participated in a three-way Iron Chef competition, with the additional complication that all of us had to edit our videos using analog equipment - no computers. We were provided several large tubs of commercial VHS tapes as our source material, and three hours to do our work in.

I borrowed most of my equipment from the public access TV station I was working at and got lucky that I didn’t have major technical issues pop up during the editing (one of the others had a very hard time getting his Macrovision breaker to work correctly, and fought with that for almost half the editing time).

My rig included:

Panasonic AG-DS545 SVHS Player
Panasonic AG-DS555 SVHS Recorder (with a scratch on the record head that left a line in everything it recorded)
Panasonic AG-A850 Editing Controller
Panasonic WJ-MX50 Video Mixer

The tapes in the tubs were a mix of subtitled and dubbed releases, and included movies, short OVAs, and a few tapes of a series - usually the first few but not always, so I decided on using Moldiver, which was one of the few complete unsubtitled series available. At six episodes long, it also offered a decent amount of footage without being too long to conveniently scrub and cue.

My final video ended up winning the vote, and it was a fun experience, but I’m very glad we don’t have to edit AMVs like that any more.

Anime - Moldiver
Music - Motoaki F. - Burning Heat! (3 Option Mix)
Completed October 2012

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link

This was a silly, quick video done for AAC's 2012 theme contest, "Year of the Dragon." I wanted a completely silly video, to an obvious song. 

Drawing inspiration from SailorDeath's Camelot video, I picked the SD segments from the Record of Lodoss War TV series as about the silliest possibility for video source, and the far too obvious song of Peter, Paul, & Mary's "Puff the Magic Dragon." 

I kind of hamstrung myself, though, since I remembered far more shots of the tiny Shooting Star than there actually being when I started working through the footage. Still, it was a cute video that got a decent reaction from the audience. 

The title is a silly Latin joke (a direct translation of the song title), and comes from the working title "Draco, Draconis, Draconem," which is itself a silly reference to the first Enchanted Forest Chronicles book, where the main character notes at one point that "she'd always been good at declining nouns."

Anime - Record of Lodoss War: Chronicles of the Heroic Knight
Music - Peter, Paul, & Mary - Puff, the Magic Dragon
Completed October 2012

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link

In 2012, Another Anime Con held a contest for original videos on the theme “What Would You Do For a Box of Pocky?” with the prize of 50 boxes of Pocky. I had a silly idea for a Metal Gear parody, so I spent the next few weeks gathering the props and costumes and shot everything over two late nights at the public access TV station I was working at, with the editing and effects taking another few days.

It won the contest, but sadly pretty much by default, as there were only two entries, and the other was a no-effort joke.

I’m still pretty happy with how it came out, even if I cringe at my horrible cheesy acting, and it taught me a lot about making original shorts.

YouTube Link

After seeing the episode “Read It and Weep,” the combination of Rainbow Dash and Reading Rainbow wouldn’t leave my head, so I quickly knocked it together in time to send it to AWA Pro 2012.

I also sent it to Youmacon 2012, where it got a positive reaction, but didn’t win anything.

Anime - My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic
Music - Tina Fabrique - Reading Rainbow Theme Song
Completed August 2012

YouTube Link

I picked up a Blu-Ray of The Secret of Kells on a whim when I saw it on a shelf of Academy Award nominees at a store, and fell in love with the movie. When I decided to try editing a video to it, I chose to play with the storyline, making Brendan’s story more of a quest brought to him by Aesling rather than how the movie actually plays out.

The modifications worked out nicely, and the video won Best Storytelling at AWA Pro 2012.

Video Source - The Secret of Kells
Music - Yasunori Mitsuda - Time's Scar (from Chrono Cross)
Completed July 2012

YouTube Link

This video was my second video to create a composite character out of multiple series, though not quite as successfully as my first. 

I'm a big fan of soccer and played it recreationally for a few years (usually as goalkeeper because nobody else wanted to), so I wanted to do a video celebrating the love of the game, from the young kids that get inspired by watching the pros, through the junior and senior leagues, up through becoming the pros they once watched. With Euro 2012 happening that summer, I felt it was a perfect time to finally put it together. 

This one rattled around in my brain with several different songs (and far more sources) for quite a while before I actually sat down to edit it. It was an "almost in desperation" edit before the Connecticon deadline as two other ideas I was working on fell apart in the two weeks before the deadline, so this one is a bit of a rush job, but it holds together pretty well, I think.

Anime - Hungry Heart Wild Striker, Gold Kids, Knight in the Area, Giant Killing
Music - Jerry Goldsmith - Take Us Out (from "Rudy")
Completed July 2012

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link

This is a video that lurked in the back of my mind ever since I listened to the soundtrack for How to Train Your Dragon. The song moves through such a clear narrative arc that it started suggesting stories to me even before I saw the movie. 

I've wanted to do a story of making a composite character from many different series for a while, and this song lent itself very well to that idea. I settled on using mostly Ghibli and Satoshi Kon movies because of the consistency and similarity of the character designs between them. 

The age breakdowns were mostly picked for what age the characters appeared to be, though the selection of 76 as the final age was a very deliberate, personal choice for me. In the summer of 2007, one of my grandfathers passed away at the age of 76, so I picked that age as a subtle personal nod. 

The pacing is also fairly deliberate, since as I remember it, when I was younger, days seemed to pass very slowly, with little change. Now that I'm in my thirties, there are times where it feels like I blink and miss a week. So I chose to make the younger time periods longer, and the older ones shorter, until the final section where the ending of the story needed to be told. 

When I submitted this to Anime Boston, it didn't make the finals, which depressed me quite a bit, given how personal this video was to me. Speaking to a couple prescreeners a few months later, they told me that they had liked the video, but were a bit confused by the age indicators until the end of the video, which were just the numbers in the version I had sent. I took that feedback and added the word "Age" to each indicator before sending it to AWA Expo, which apparently helped clear up the confusion, since it won "Best Storytelling" there, and later "Best Drama" at AAC.

Anime - Tokyo Godfathers, My Neighbor Totoro, Whisper of the Heart, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Kiki's Delivery Service, Paprika, Perfect Blue, Ponyo, The Cat Returns, Millennium Actress
Music - John Powell - Forbidden Friendship
Completed March 2012

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link

Anime - Various
Song - Beach Boys - I Get Around
Completed October 2011
Premiered October 21, 2011
Animemusicvideos.org Link
YouTube Link

This was my winning video from the Bakuretsucon 2011 Iron Editor. The sources were agreed on before the match, and the song was from a list of six that was given to us a week before the match.

Anime - Various
Song - the HIATUS - Betelgeuse no Akari
Completed October 2011
Premiered October 15, 2011
Animemusicvideos.org Link
YouTube Link

This was the runner-up video in the AAC '11 Extreme Iron Editor contest.

I can't remember all of the challenges that were thrown at us; the one that sticks out was having to roll a d20 and add that many lens flares to the video. We rolled a 15, and there are 17 in the video.

Anime - Various
Song - Two Steps From Hell - Dragon Rider
Completed October 2011
Premiered October 14, 2011
Animemusicvideos.org Link
YouTube Link

At Another Anime Convention 2011, OtakuForLife ran a workshop on AMVs and asked for people to bring betas for critique. Having nothing in progress at the time, and fearing that no one would be bringing anything, I spent about an hour and 45 minutes throwing together a short video with the sources I had on my hard drive for an Iron Chef match the next week.

There's a lot of problems with it, given the short period it was put together in, but I kind of like it. It got a decent reaction at the workshop, too.

I like the idea, and may revisit it as a whole video someday, using the rest of the series that I didn't have available at the time.