My first con was Animinneapolis last year, which was a blast, but there was no Avatar Music Video contest. This year one was announced, tho, so I decided to compete for the first time!
All the AMVs I'd made up to then (maybe 3 or 4 total) violated the rules for one reason or another, so I figured I'd make a new one. Genre? Comedy, of course. My editing skills aren't that great, the deadline was fast approaching, and it's always easy and quick to make something amusingly stupid.
The Avatar? Bodacious Space Pirates. I loved that show. So, to work. Asked all my friends for every song they could think of involving pirates, bought Sony Vegas (I decided doing AMVs with AVISynth and VirtualDub is just too hard), downloaded a BD season torrent of the series, and I was off.
I had a rough patch when I discovered Sony Vegas wouldn't import any of the .wmv files I'd downloaded, and then discovered ffmpeg, yay. I ended up liking quite a few songs and had a hard time deciding which to use when I realized -- hey, this is SUPPOSED to be stupid -- let's just use ALL of them.
The learning curve for Sony Vegas is a bit steep but not totally overwhelming. I searched out a lot of tutorials on Youtube which helped. I know enough now to do the basics, tho I am still learning the more advanced stuff.
And thus "" was born.
Here are some things I learned from competing:
I had a credits screen on the end but the rules said not to include that, so I deselected that track and encoded the file for the show, not thinking that this meant there would be a blank screen at the end for maybe 4 seconds. I should have trimmed that shorter to compensate. When it was shown at the show, everyone sort of stared blankly at the screen at the end thinking "Is something supposed to happen here?"
I normalized all the songs to 89 dB, which is what I usually do for all the music on my streaming Jpop station, but that turned out to be way too quiet. All the other videos were super loud, and then mine played and -- while it wasn't inaudible -- it sure lacked the same punch. There must be some universally understood dB level everyone normalizes to that I don't know about yet.
The video pixellated near the beginning like the player wasn't keeping up, so maybe the bitrate was too high, too low, or I made some other simple encoding mistake. My encoding-fu is not strong.
Also there was a scene that was very dark. Some of it was dark grey, some of it was black, and there was a lot of pixellation as the codec dithered between the two. That didn't look very good. More encoder-fu failure.
I tried very hard not to get my hopes up that I was going to win anything, telling myself the goal was to share my creation on the big screen, make people laugh, and to have fun.
But I was a bit disappointed I didn't win the comedy category (tho I did get a funny award for "Best Use of Attention Deficit Disorder" due to switching between five songs during the video, Avatar Music Video Hell style)? It did help that I thought the video that did win comedy totally deserved it. I was also disappointed with myself for feeling that way.
However, tho I went to bed that night feeling a little bummed, in the morning when I woke up I thought it was all completely hilarious, so that worked out.
My entry into the competition intrigued my son Joel, so he came along to the con for one day so he could be with me at the showing. He really enjoyed the whole day, and I loved having him with me. All the other AMVs shown were super impressive and/or funny. It was a great show and I'm thrilled to have been a part of it.
All in all it was more fun than ought to be legal, and I will give it a go next year without fail.








