AMV Autobiography

[qyll]

You know, I can’t remember when exactly I got into anime (not AMVs). While the past is like a grand panorama to some people, to me, it’s just a series of out-of-focus photographs. The first thing I do remember about anime was that I disliked it. Maybe it was because I was loyal to the cartoons of the day. Honestly, I didn’t even realize that Pokemon was Japanese until a while I was in middle school, and so I never thought that the Pokemon anime was Japanese. This was about ten years ago.

My first conscious encounter with anime was in the basement of my best friend’s house in 2004. It was an average summer afternoon, and we were two ninth graders doing some average summer afternoon things: swimming, eating, lounging around under the sun. Then my friend decided that he wanted to watch an episode of this new anime that he was picked up. Now, for some reason, that piqued by curiosity. I was only able to get a glimpse of the title before my friend swatted at me and told me to play some Xbox. I understand why now. Elfen Lied really isn’t a series that you watch with friends.

The name “Elfen Lied” stayed on the back burner for quite a while – A full year passed before one day while sitting at my computer, I decided to watch it. After I finished, I realized that I had just watched one of the greatest things in my short 15 year lifespan. It was better than any movie or book or TV show. And to this day, Elfen Lied still has a special place in my heart.

Fast forward.

It’s now 2006 and I’ve watched quite a few series already. Cowboy Bebop, Love Hina, Berserk, Mai HiME, etc. Youtube was on the rise at the time, and I saw a few AMVs, but they didn’t catch my attention. I read about the buzz on a new anime titled “The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya”. I watch the first episode.

Yeech. That tasted like bad decision.

A month passes and the buzz doesn’t subside. I decide to watch the second episode, and the rest is history. You know that saying “Don’t judge a book by it’s cover?” Well, it should be “Don’t judge an anime by its first episode.” Yes, I’m looking at you, Texhnolyze.

In August of 2006, I made my first AMV. This is probably the most important part, yet the part I remember the least about. Unlike most of the posters on this forum, I’ve never been to an anime convention. AMVs first came to me through a 320 x 240 flash video. Never mind that it was pixelated and horribly edited, it was a breath of fresh air to me. You mean to tell me that I could find my favorite animes edited to my favorite songs!? That’s an awesome deal, thank you very much.
I suppose that the next logical step was for me to try to edit my own video. I’m embarrassed to say that my very first “AMV” consisted of me taking the intro music of Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni and pasting it onto the video intro of Kimi Ga Nozomu Eien. I was proud. Naïve, yes, but proud. I’m not exaggerating either: that’s the proudest I’ve felt after any video I’ve made since. You know that saying “Ignorance is bliss”? Well, it should be “Cheap copy-and-paste ‘projects’ belongs in the Louvre.”

A simple search of “AMV” led me to this site. I fell in love like a fat kid falls on a cheeseburger. I got an idea of what a proper AMV looked like. I guess it at that point that I simply told myself “I’m going to be good at this.” There really was no inspiration – just infatuation. I immediately went to work. A Hikaru no Go opening coupled with Haruhi!? BRILLIANT!!

I made my first legit AMV in less than an hour.

And then I made my next one in an hour twenty minutes after I finished my first one.

By early October, I had upgraded from Windows Movie Maker to Adobe Premiere. I went through the typical Premiere fanboy phase. Blurs were the new vogue, and lens flares were worth a million bucks. I retreated from the org for a few months to work on my editing skills, slowly learning from each bad cut and mistimed beat.
In March of 2007, I made “Lucid”, which is one of the few videos that matched my original vision. That month, I went on a Haruhi rampage and created three videos. The last one, Haruhi Sopranos Style, took a good half hour to make. I started to develop my own style by then that consisted mostly of “effects are awesome. Fades suck”. Five days after my last video, I was accepted to the college of my dreams. Things were looking up.

In the beginning of May that year, I made my most ambitious project up to that point. Good manga videos were lacking, and I thought I’d try my hand at one with the Fruits Basket Manga. That was the first video that required me to use heavy photoshopping to cut out characters and animate them in Premiere. Unfortunately, I didn’t know how to use the pen tool, so all the cutouts were made from the magic wand + eraser combo. After it all came together, I knew that I had something awesome. Today, I look back and wonder how the hell I had the patience to make a video like that. Perhaps it was my massive supply of morale at the time.
Life went on. I made All That Glitters out of a glint of inspiration when I realized that All Star would be the perfect song for Haruhi. I stayed on campus that summer and was finally able to put my video editing skills to good use. I made a video for my film class that received an “A”. Celebration was had, and I laid on the mosh pit for ten minutes before my man, Martin Scorsese offered me the position of head editor for his next blockbuster.

I edited Awwwright during the fall term of my freshman year. Really, there’s not much else to say. I made two more videos in 2007. One of the FMA Manga to the opening of Full Metal Panic, and another one to Hoshi no Koe, which is still my personal favorite. After a half year hiatus, I picked up a project that I had scrapped earlier and made Everything: A Tribute to Kaname Chidori.

That’s it.

As for the future, I’m working on a BECK video right now. I like the way it’s turning out, and hopefully it’ll be done by December. School has got my by the balls right now.

[trythil]

[trythil]

Hey, I just realized that the global financial crisis actually makes the plot work with my general feeling towards AMVs over time.

Thanks, housing bubble!

[dwchang]

Unlike others which were tl;dr, this one I almost immediately understood. Given you didn't label the Y-axis so I don't know what we're measuring here David .

[trythil]

Unlike others which were tl;dr, this one I almost immediately understood. Given you didn't label the Y-axis so I don't know what we're measuring here David :P.

"A picture says a thousand words" might be cliché, but there's some truth in it.

I wasn't really sure how to label the Y-axis, because it's very hard to quantify something like "how much I enjoy AMVs at time t". I can say "I enjoyed it more at t than t'" and draw pictures accordingly, but I don't know how to attach numerical values to those feelings.

Probably just labeling the Y-axis might have been enough.

There's a second, much more practical, reason why I didn't label the Y-axis. I ganked the image off a screen capture of the European Central Bank's graph of EUR -> USD exchange rates, and only did minimal manipulations.

On a total tangent, the ECB uses jQuery in their web pages (check the page source). I thought that was pretty damn cool.

[dwchang]

Unlike others which were tl;dr, this one I almost immediately understood. Given you didn't label the Y-axis so I don't know what we're measuring here David .

"A picture says a thousand words" might be cliché, but there's some truth in it.

I wasn't really sure how to label the Y-axis, because it's very hard to quantify something like "how much I enjoy AMVs at time t". I can say "I enjoyed it more at t than t'" and draw pictures accordingly, but I don't know how to attach numerical values to those feelings.

Probably just labeling the Y-axis might have been enough.

Well my original assumption was the Y-Axis was 'interest in AMVs' or 'quality of my AMVs' (with emphasis on the former as my real guess). But yes, labels help .

I demand people use more figures in this rather than posts that are tl;dr

>_>

[godix]

I demand people use more figures in this rather than posts that are tl;dr

Happy?

[Garridy]

This is my story...
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3211/297 ... 6afc_o.png

That pretty much sums it up for me as well. lol

[dwchang]

I demand people use more figures in this rather than posts that are tl;dr

Happy?

Yes sir.

[LuluandAuron]

It is great to get a glimpse into the minds of other editors. I've always found that fascinating.

I got the bug for editing at 12 years old, before there was such a thing as a "music video" I'd listen to music and imagine scenes to it. Well soon along came "music videos" and I was enthralled. However, this is long before a computer or microwave was a normal thing in a house. In fact, we were one of the first families on our block to own a vcr....we had a beta machine as well.

In 1997, we got our first computer....a one gig beast that I had trouble even turning on. I'd press the button and then recoil in horror afraid it would break. The biggest file stored on that computer was a 16mb copy of the death scene in FF7.
I discovered Power point, and the fascination of music and scenes was reborn. I'd take pictures and add them into power point then play music along with them.

The next thing to happen was we bought a camcorder, and I started to use vcr to vcr editing for family movies. Anyone who has edited this way knows the difficulty of editing this way.....How be it, it was good experience and I loved to watch my stuff when I was done.

We still had the one gig comp at the time, and I'd crashed it so many times it wasn't even funny. I mentioned to my husband that maybe we should get a computer so we could edit the family video on it....surely it would be easier. Remember, at this point, I had never seen an AMV.

Well the new computer came September 2002, we had no net, as "what the hell do we need the net for" the computer cost a fortune. Well within a few days, our son, 16 at the time started bringing home discs he'd burned at his friends of amv's...more so gmv's (we're all big gamers) We were all hooked. Now being as computer illiterate as I was, I didn't even know there was such a thing as wmm.

We had a program that came with our firewire and started using that.....it sucked, you could not even time anything to the music, it was worse then vcr to vcr, because at least with that method, you could time.

After much searching, we found wmm and all three of us began editing to captured footage.

Now a few things happened during this time. One of them is going to sound so unrelated to amvs, but it helped eventually to get our foot in the door at an amv community and in the company of people that would critique our work.

It was close to Halloween and we decided to be Auron and Lulu for Halloween (didn't even know there was such a thing as cosplay yet) We had professional pics taken and the photographer still uses our pics in his advertising.

Next....we found out wmm has limits. That after so many cuts, it just won't export without crashing.

We got Adobe Premiere 6.5

And we got the net.

We soon found a community and ended up posting our pics of A&L. Now I don't think without those pics, we would of had a hope of being welcomed into that community as our videos really sucked.

Aerials was my first real video that wasn't a miss mash of crap. I spent 6 weeks just looking for a song that would fit Xenogears. It was also my submission video into the studio I belonged to for a while. I was to do a minute, and send it in. My mentor at the time, took a look at the first minute I'd done and told me to start over. I cried and cried, but bit my lip, and started over. Harsh, ya....but that was the reason I wanted into that community. I wanted to become a good editor that could take constructive criticism.

To this day, that video is still one of my favorate pieces, and probably the only one of my videos I would never want to redo. I think that's because it was my first glimpse at what the 12 year old girl invisioned so long ago. It's not perfect, but to me it is just right. It was released July 4th 2003 and I was honored as a Canadian to have that release date.

The next project I decided to do actually spanned almost 6 years now and consists of 6 video to date.

We didn't have much anime, and I had a new found love for Chinese history due to the game Dynasty Warriors. However, if you've played these games, the voice acting is rather lame.....but the novel and history is very interesting. So I thought, what if I could take the fmv's and recreate all that interesting stuff. At first I decided to do one video, but soon realized that to pull it off fully, I need to do three. So Chapter 1, 2, and 3 where born.

I had finally stumbled across the org, and checked the catalog for DW, it was there. Also only two other videos of that footage existed; one was a dead link, and the other was footage video taped off the tv and turned into an amv >_< So YAY!!!

So off to work I went on the the three videos. A year later, I finished and went to upload to the org. Dynasty Warriors was crossed off of the allowable media. However, I made a post and Tsunami Jones answered, and the org reinstated DW. I felt pretty good about that.

These three, I would love to do again, as the studio I was in, would get your video, tag it and thus your quality was crappy.

Between the second and third chapter was a competition video using FF8 and Prayer by Disturbed. I listened to the song over and over and thought the only way to pull this story off right, was to do it from Ultimecias point of view. However, three frames exist of her......could I pull it off, I was determined. The video had mixed reviews, some liked it, some hated it, but the main thing for me was, I pulled it off.

Next came a video that started my change as who I was as an editor.

This is the org and centers on anime, whereas I was a gmv editor. I had ideas for amvs, but my insatiable obsession for Chinese history was closer to my heart.

Also, Euphoria had come out and by this time the Euphoria copy cats were being released like crazy.

Now whether you loved it or hated it, Euphoria changed amvs.

Personally it's in my top twenty. It made me ask myself, where do I want to fit in in this great big world of Editing. I knew storytelling was were my strength lied. So I pushed a storyline in this video that did not exist footage wise, so I needed to imply it. When finished, I took it to a history site on the three kingdoms and it had excellent reviews. They seen the story I'd implied.

So next I searched and searched for more DW gmv's and found one more. I started to think, if I could take these four videos somewhere on the net, that they could get exposure, I'd have my own Euphoria (sorry for the pretentiousness, but look on the tube and see how many are there now .....from 5, plus a dead link)

I stumbled across a site called koeiwarriors, and that's where they had there debut.....also crashed a server....not mine.

The next two videos are very similar in style, but to different footage. One to of coarse DW based on two chapters in the novel called The Lesser of Two Evils, and the other to AC. I had picked the song for advent children in 2003 and got yelled at by a studio mate that I didn't even know what the story would be about....but I had this feeling. The first time I watched AC wasn't to see it as much as to see if this song was going to work, and Pervading Shadow was made

I learned, not everyone gets your videos, and having Cloud stabbed in the final scene is angering to a few people.

Lesser of Two Evils video was nominated in the first ever Koeiwarriors video competition...at one point it sat in dead last place. It is not a happy video and kind of leaves you a bit shaken if you're a fanboy or fangirl. However, it got a third and more importantly I was contacted by Koei marketing manager from the UK who wanted to tell me he was a fan of my work. That was a bit weird for me, great but....weird.

At this time I was working on a video that my daughter had given me a song for. AFI 12/21. Listening to it, I could see FFX, but I did not want to use FF again. However, if I was going to do this video, I wanted to push myself. I was also on a quest to find my editing innocence. You know, that feeling you had the first couple times you edited....I wanted that back.

So I let my imagination run wild and really had fun. Out of all my videos, this one really needed beta testers, and I don't know what I would have done without their input on what was/wasn't working.
It also gave me a huge surprise at Animithon 14 where it won fan favorite....over comedy....it was a Romance Sentimental. What is this world coming to???? I missed the awards ceremony My neighbor came banging on the door at 8pm to tell me. I thought he was kidding. But it was great because I got to go for coffee with Vlad, a few times now. We gotta do that again soon.

So next came another DW video. I was determined to win the koeiwarriors video awards this time. I needed to edit to catch non editors attention, as that's who did most of the judging. So away I went, with my innocence recaptured. At one point, I decided, it didn't even matter if I won. I really had an awesome time just playing and pushing the program to it's limits.

It ended up winning video of the year at KW.

My time had come finally to work with some anime, plus I wasn't getting the criticism I needed doing gmvs.

I did a short piece to VHD: Bloodlust.

Also the two tiers of the iron chef here at the org, which was so much fun.

I had a song picked out for Habane Renmei that is from one of those artists we can't post here at the org. I argued and argued with myself over this video and even left it for a year and a half. But every time I heard the song, it weighed heavy on my mind. It was such an over used song, but the way I wanted to do it, would twist the lyrics to mean something else...and they fit. So the making of the video finally happened.
I won another award at Animithon. But I had not prepared the audio right, so it sounded like crap......we learn from our mistakes.

At the moment i have 6 videos in the works, two DW and the other four Anime. Two of the videos are very difficult in not only concept/story, but to even pull them off properly. But the more we push ourselves, the more we learn.

Also, I started a job a couple weeks back as an editor and I'm learning CS3. It's a big jump from 6.5, but I love to learn more, and it always makes me think of jubjub2s Word Play

Give up editing anytime soon....never