Hurricane- AX 2011 Drama Finalist

[Radical_Yue]

You already know what I thought of Hurricane

Now for "The Promise"....

First off, the black bars on the top and bottom are a no-no. You want to have them when submitting to contests, but make sure they're gone when you release the final product.

Now, when you chose to take on this song...you chose a pretty massive monster to fight since quite a few people associate it with:

(I know I do >.>;;)
In addition to the song choice, just about any Shinkai movie is known for being so overused to the point where most can see it in their sleep x_X

To put it simply...ambitious choices were ambitious.

Sadly, the video didn't do it for me. You've got a beautiful song that almost creates a feeling of flowing water moving through you, so you expect nice movement to match it. Yet immediately there are scenes that are completely still or have very little/incredibly slow movement.

The overlays probably weren't the best choices either. The one at 0:59 is almost funny with how fast it's in and out. When it comes to syncing with all the little noises and goodies that you used the overlays for, it may have been a better idea to do something a bit more simple. Syncing with actual movement or lighting/coloring effects...nothing flashy of course, but just something simple and moving.

Once the song kicks in, the overlays become a bit more bearable but still look really out of place. And the footage still isn't connecting properly to the beautiful flow that the music is projecting.

The cookie cutter effects you did when the beat kicks in even harder weren't a bad idea but they needed to move a lot smoother and be blended better.

But by the end of the video, your editing slows back down again and you just kinda show the end of the movie. Nothing too much more than that

Ambitious choices but sadly, you just couldn't seem to pull it off.

I look forward to your future videos

[TrufflePigStudios]

Thanks for the input Yue!

Yeah, like all of my amvs I made for the AX contest this year, there are lot of rough edges. I only had about 3 weeks to get my stuff together before the deadline (I didn't think I was going to be able to go to the con this year so I wasn't going to enter), and usually I like to put things away for about a month so I can come back later and see all the flaws that I couldn't fix when I was too wrapped up in the first edit.

It's interesting how different people hear completely different things in music, I think I was much more focused on the bassline in my editing than on the smoother top voices in the music. I guess I'm pretty new to Shinkai's work so I haven't seen it overused so much. I agree completely that a lot of things need to be smoother, a lot of that is just messing with some of the kinks in the amv, but some of the other things that you said were more to do with concept. The first half of the amv (before the song picks up) was made deliberately more stagnant (and I even emphasized that by dulling out the colors). I also agree that some of the overlay in the first half might be necessary (but at :59 specifically that was there to accent that strange little noise that occurs there, so to me that one is justified ). But yeah, the first half is supposed to be a stark contrast to the second half where the music picks up (and the colors exploddeee-or at least their supposed to). The second half definately needs some more work on the transitions and how to best go about getting the effect I wanted...Because I'm perfectly willing to say that after the first "epic" moment of the sunlight breaking through it kind of deteriorates from my original vision. The amv is supposed to be somewhat narrative (why the end shows up at the end...) but I've never been perfectly happy with the ending either. I know this needs some serious re-working, and I put it up because I'm really just sick of looking at it and I want to move on to other projects. Sometime in the future I might revamp it so thanks for the input, definitely will give me a lot to ponder in the next few months while I try and gain the motivation to fix it

(Oh and the black borders...when I didn't have them the image got stretched vertically and it looked terrible....I'm clearly missing something in the rendering, but I don't know what that may be)


Thanks for the link too, I've actually never seen another amv to that song, so I didn't now one existed I don't really think it's fair to compare them though since the first half of the song in that one gets used for credits- but it was a seriously cool piece of work, so thanks!

-hugs-

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