Honou Productions

Source - Avalon webcomic Song - Shimokawa Mikuni - Sore ga, Ai deshou? Completed February 2004 Premiered February 27, 2004 Download link (12.6 MB) YouTube link This was a bit of a gift for the fans of the C & P pairing. With the song completely and irrevocably stuck in my head, I happened across a translation of the lyrics, and immediately thought of Avalon. This was a fun way of learning keyframing in After Effects, and I like how it ended up coming out. There is also a Sub Station Alpha script with the translated lyrics as subtitles available here.

Anime - Pom Poko Song - Michael & Patty Silversher - Gummi Bears Theme Song Completed December 2003 Premiered February 13, 2004 AnimeMusicVideos.org Link YouTube Link The blame for this one lies squarely on sleep deprivation, too much sugar, and Richard "Pocky" Kim's performance at Katsucon 9. A few months after Katsu, immediately after our finals finished, two friends and I sat down to bounce AMV ideas off of each other, while we played songs in the background. When someone dropped this CD into the player (we're still not sure who did), we remembered Pocky's bouncing onstage to this song at the cosplay. I had the "bright" idea of doing a video to this song to torment poor, long-suffering Pocky with at the next Katsucon. After much laughter, we moved on to other ideas, but I hung onto the image of the ubiquitous con personality bouncing on stage in the back of my mind, and decided to actually do it. The first order of business was to decide what anime to use. I rejected several ideas (Chibi Goddesses, Record of Lodoss War (SD segments), and other similarly cute shows) before I stumbled across the Ghibli classic Pom Poko in the anime club library, which was due for a R2 DVD release very shortly. The DVD was preordered in short order (Hey, you can never have too much Ghibli). Unfortunately, the other piece of footage that I desperately wanted to include was not available, as the copy of it that I asked the Katsu con chair for got lost en route to me. Having the actual scene of Pocky at K9 in the video would have been wonderful, and I actually created an edited version of the song specifically to include that five seconds of his embarrasment. ^_^ Then came my final class, graduation, and moving back to my home state, along with applying to graduate school, so the video simmered on the back burner until I finally sat down to edit the video in mid-November. As to the actual editing, I decided to not use any digital effects, since I had little enough time to edit the video already, and the fact the they were largely unnecessary to the video. So the only effects in this video are cuts and crossfades, with a very few clips slowed down to about 85% speed to fit a lyric. I also had to choose whether to cut the song before the instrumental, or to do the entire song. I tried both ways, and eventually decided to keep what I thought was a fairly weak instrumental section because I liked the way the final vocal segment looked. In particular, I liked the final clip, (Actually not from the movie, but from the trailers on Disk 2) which makes the video look a little like a real opening with a title card at the end. Convention History: Katsucon 10 - Winner, Judge's Award AnimeEvolution 2004 - Winner, Best Fun/Upbeat Bakuretsucon 2004 - Entrant

Anime - Mahoromatic Song - Sophie B. Hawkins - As I Lay Me Down Completed July 2003 Premiered November 8, 2003 AnimeMusicVideos.org Link YouTube Link This is the first video I finished after graduating from college, so I was looking to make a fairly nostalgic and sentimental video to fit my mood at the time. I had just finished watching all of Mahoromatic and Mahoromatic 2 with my brother, so that was the series that stuck in my head when I sat down to find a song. It took me a few days to find an appropriate song in my brother's collection, and another day to watch the first season again (DVDs of the second season hadn't been released yet) and take notes on the scenes I wanted to use. I'd have liked to use several scenes from the second season (especially episode 13), but without high-quality source, I couldn't. Actually editing the video was a lot easier than I expected, especially since I didn't use almost any special effects except crossfades and speed changes. The most interesting technical hurdle was determining how to edit the anamorphic footage in MediaStudio Pro 6. I eventually decided to edit in the full 720x480 squished mode and resize/letterbox after the final export. The one digital effect I used was the gaussian blur "transition" at 1:19 and again before the quick flashes at 2:22. I really liked the way it looked, and might use a similar effect in future videos. One thing that irrites me that I didn't catch earlier is that the horizontal black padding on the first DVD is about four times the size of the padding on the other two, so it's very easy to tell which scenes came from the first DVD. As Mahoro Sleeps was entered in the Nekocon 6 AMV contest and missed the submission deadline for AnimeUSA 5 because I mailed the form too late. Convention History: NekoCon 6 - Entrant Bakuretsucon 2004 - Entrant

Anime - X TV Song - Heart - These Dreams Completed May 2003 Premiered June 13, 2003 AnimeMusicVideos.org Link YouTube Link The inspiration for this one came when my older brother gave me his copy of the "Heart - Greatest Hits (1985-1995)" CD. What better way to visualize a song about dreams than with the four Dreamseers of X? It took me about four months from when I had the idea to when I actually had time to sit down and edit the video, since I was in my final semester of college. This video was unfortunately quite rushed, so as to be submitted in time for Otakon, and I think that hurt it somewhat, as the timing could have been a bit tighter and there were a number of special effects that I had planned, but ended up not using at all, because of time. I'm particularly satisfied with Kotori's chorus and the "Could it be spring or fall" line. Convention History: AnimeEvolution 2003 - Finalist Otakon 2003 - Entrant, non-Finalist

Anime - Ah! My Goddess (OVA & Movie) Song - Styx - Show Me the Way Completed November 2002 Premiered January 12, 2003 AnimeMusicVideos.org Link YouTube Link YouTube Link (Remastered version) When inspiration strikes, sometimes you don't have the resources to run with it. That was the way this video started out, as I was listening to my older brother's CD collection for something interesting while at home for the end of summer break. The idea struck halfway through the first verse, and simmered there until I could get back to my apartment at college and start in on it. I actually had to rebuild the project twice during the month and a half I spent between classes creating this video, both times because I had ripped the movie footage in the wrong aspect ratio. The instrumentals of this one are, hands down, the weakest part of the video. I'm still not completely happy with several of them, though the long one in the middle of the song, which shows every character in the series I'm fairly proud of. This video is also the first video since Corbies that I extensively used digital effects, and I like to think that they worked quite well in the video. I originally planned to debut this video at NekoCon V, which would have been my 1-year anniversary of submitting videos to cons (Rouge's Prayer at NekoCon FLASH), but somewhere between them being received and the compilation of the contest tape, it got lost, so I decided to keep it under wraps until Ohayocon two months later. At the urging of a friend of mine who was going to AnimeEvolution, I sent this video there as well. Convention History: Ohayocon 3 - Winner, Best Drama AnimeEvolution 2003 - Winner, Best Drama/Romance; Best Artistic; Judge's Best Overall

Anime - Lunar: Silver Star Story Song - Phil Collins - Two Worlds Completed July 2002 Premiered July 12, 2002 AnimeMusicVideos.org Link YouTube Link When my DVD drive died partway through making a video, I was left with the urge to make a video, but without the means for all of the ideas I already had. So just for the sake of doing something, I picked up Lunar: Silver Star Story and played through it in under three days of marathon game sessions. After I finished, I suddenly wanted to make an Alex and Luna video, with a smattering of Jessica/Kyle and Nash/Mia. Since I still had a CD drive functioning, the video was readily available. The song, however, was much, much harder, taking three days of hunting, and ransacking not only my collection of CDs and MP3s, but my roommate's as well. Finally, I came across a song I'd never heard before on one of his CDs, and was struck with inspiration. In one marathon all-night videofest, I scripted and spliced together the video, finishing around seven in the morning. Looking back over it, I'm very proud of the "Raise your head up/Lift high the load" segment. One interesting thing is how the two closeups of Nash both seem to be lipsynched, though neither of them were even intended to be that way; the video actually looks like that in the game. And yes, the song is supposed to cut off like that. I faded it out about five seconds early, but it's already gradually fading at that point, I just sped it up a bit. Convention History: Not Entered to Conventions

Source - Avalon webcomic Song - Princess Rouge OST - Ushina Wareta Kako Completed July 2002 Premiered July 19, 2002 Download Link (3.27 MB) YouTube Link In July 2002, Josh Philips (artist of the webcomic Avalon) had announced his immenent return from his first major haitus, and the idea I had had kicking around in my head for an Avalon-based video finally congealed. After an all-night editing and coloring fest, I posted the final result to the Forum on July 19th. I also had the privilege of personally handing Josh a CD containing all the original source files at Otakon 2002 later that summer.

Anime - Various Song - John Williams - 1988 Olympic Theme Completed February 2002 Premiered February 4, 2002 AnimeMusicVideos.org Link YouTube Link This was my first video that pulled from more than one source and ended up taking me nearly five months to complete, from when I first started scripting out the video to the final render. One thing that kept delaying me was finding more footage that would fit into the video. At some point, I said enough, and refused to introduce any footage that I didn't already have on hand. Once I did that, I finished a week later. ^_^ All in all, there are 39 series or movies in this video, ranging from pure sports anime like Battle Athletes to completely out-of-context clips from things like Jin-Roh. I might end up sending this to AWA or Nekocon, but only if I go (I want to be at any con I send my videos to). In the course of making this video, I probably watched over a week's worth of anime, looking for footage to use, and ended up using about a sixth of what I captured. The video grouped clips by sport, and I'm most proud of the volleyball and combat sports segments, while I'm least proud of the track segment early in the video. I really tried to limit using a lot of any one series, and this ended up using a little more Battle Athletes than I wanted, though it really worked out quite well. Convention History: Ohayocon 3 - Entrant AnimeEvolution 2003 - Entrant, non-Finalist Anime Mid-Atlantic - Finalist

Anime - Slayers, Slayers Next Song - Ace of Base - Edge of Heaven Completed December 2001 Premiered December 19, 2001 AnimeMusicVideos.org link This video was started in early November 2001, about a month after Jess suggested that a serious Slayers video with a particular scene at the end would be really interesting. So I set out to do it, finding the perfect song for it only after a vast amount of hunting. I finished a month and a half later, most of that time spent watching the series again and storyboarding. I really cut the Katsucon 8 deadline closely on this one, finishing only an hour and a half before I needed to put the videotape in the mail. Convention History: Katsucon 8 - Entrant, non-Finalist Otakon 2002 - Entrant, non-Finalist

Anime - Magic Knight Rayearth Song - Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past - Dark World Theme (Orchestral) Completed August 2001 Premiered November 11, 2001 AnimeMusicVideos.org Link YouTube Link The fact that the first season of Rayearth plays out like a stereotypical RPG is even mentioned in the series itself, so when I went looking for a song to do a Hikaru tribute to, this song fell right into my lap. The fact that this was my first all-instrumental video made it a lot more work than my others, but I think it came out quite well. This was also the last video I did during the summer of 2001, and was completed only a few days before I returned to school. At some point, I plan on doing Umi and Fuu videos to similar songs, but those videos are on the back burner for a while. Convention History: MindWarp 2001 Fall/Winter AMV Contest - Entrant