Project Editor

Round 5’s theme for Project OrgEditor 2022 was “Roll For Initiative” and asked for videos demonstrating one of the Dungeons & Dragons character statistics. I decided that Luck would be my best bet, and decided to do a character profile of one of the unluckiest characters in anime, Ryouga Hibiki from Ranma ½.

This turned out to be a bit of a dumb move on my part, since although I’m familiar with the series, it’s mostly been through the manga, and I haven’t seen most of the TV series. Scrubbing 167 TV series episodes, 11 OVAs, and 3 movies for scenes of a secondary character in less than a week was definitely not the smartest move I’ve ever made.

For the song, while Hee Haw was a bit before my time, but my mother had frequently sung the “Gloom, Despair, and Agony On Me” song it made popular when I was young, so that musical phrase has stuck in my head for many years. I found a few different covers of it, and settled on the version by Starlings, TN to use.

The actual editing was pretty rushed because of how long scrubbing all the footage took, but overall, I like the result.

Anime – Ranma ½
Music – Starlings, TN – Gloom, Despair, and Agony on Me
Completed December 2022

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link

The theme for Project OrgEditor 2022’s Round 4 was “Who’s that POEkémon?,” and called for a video exemplifying one of the standard Pokemon types. I only had two days to edit this round, as I was travelling internationally for most of the week and only got back on the Thursday before the Sunday deadline.

I took what I felt would be the easiest type, Dragon, and went back to the well of short-duration production music in Two Steps From Hell’s “Sky Titans” for the audio, and just threw together as many dragons as I could find in my collection.

For such an insane rush job, it worked surprisingly well and got a pretty good score from the judges.

Anime – Familiar of Zero, Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid, Pokemon: Black & White, Record of Lodoss War, Slayers, Spirited Away
Music – Two Steps From Hell – Sky Titans
Completed December 2022

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link

Round 3’s theme for Project OrgEditor 2022 was “All Grown Up” and asked us to create videos exploring growing up or coming of age.

I had watched The Muppets Take Manhattan the week before this round, and “Saying Goodbye” was stuck in my head at the time. The original Muppets version didn’t quite work for the tone I was going for, but searching YouTube found me johnny0104’s excellent cover of it.

My original plan was to use as many graduation sequences as I could, but as I started searching, I kept coming back to Azumanga and the relationship between Chiyo and Sasaki. Of the main cast, they always struck me as the pair that would stay in contact even after life took them in different directions.

I originally wanted to use the whole song, but ended up cutting it down due to lack of footage and time. I might revisit the idea again someday, but not soon.

Anime – Azumanga Daioh
Music – johnnyj0104 – Saying Goodbye (from The Muppets Take Manhattan)
Completed November 2022

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link

The theme for Round 2 of Project OrgEditor 2022 was “Drawn Together” and required using a variety of types of source material (animated, CGI, live action, video games, manga/comics, etc.). I generally work best with finding a song first, so I went digging through my music collection for inspiration, eventually settling on Two Steps From Hell’s “Elven Princess.” The song title and lyrics in Tolkien’s Elvish immediately suggested a collection of classical fantasy elves.

I deliberately structured the order to go from anime to CGI animation to live action and back as an attempt at symmetry, though I didn’t have a good place to use How Not to Summon a Demon Lord in the front half, and only included it in the back half.

Overall, this is one of the videos I liked making best from this year’s POE event, and came together better than I expected.

Video – Secret of Kells, Record of Lodoss War OVA, The Dragon Prince, Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, How Not to Summon a Demon Lord
Audio – Two Steps From Hell – Elven Princess

AnimeMusicVideos.org Link
YouTube Link

The theme for Round 1 of Project OrgEditor 2022 was “Villains,” which proved a surprisingly difficult theme to find a good source for. Digging through my shelves, I discovered that while it’s a very large collection, I watch very few things that have outright villains – lots of antagonists and opponents, but not many true villains. I ended up settling on the first Nanoha movie more out of default than anything else. For the song, I’d been on a big Battle Beast kick at the time, and pulled out one of the songs I’d been listening to a lot.

The title comes from the idiom meaning having the dominant position or control over a group, which I’d seen used several times in a book a few weeks earlier, and the infamous abuse scene with Presea and Fate.

This made an okay pairing, but was hamstrung a bit by the lack of footage – I kept remembering scenes from the TV series that weren’t in the movie and having to change tactics every time that happened.

Anime – Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha The Movie 1st
Music – Battle Beast – Master of Illusion
Completed November 2022

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

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

Anime – Various
Song – Kurt Schneider & Sam Tsui – Summer Pop Medley
Completed July 2011
Premiered July 14, 2011
Animemusicvideos.org Link
YouTube Link

This was a collaboration between me and Replay Studios for the fourth round of Project OrgEditor.

After deciding that we wanted to use a mashup song, Replay found the one we eventually decided on, and we came up with the overarching theme of “Summer” for the whole video, using a different anime for each segment. Replay edited the odd segments, and I edited the evens.

This video finished fourth in the round and saw both of us eliminated.