Review - Dear Diary - Amo-Chan

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CodeZTM
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Review - Dear Diary - Amo-Chan

Post by CodeZTM » Tue Nov 16, 2010 9:54 am

1) The video will not be posted by the creator (we have announcement forums for that).
2) The video will not have a currently active announcement thread.
3) The thread creator should post their thoughts on the video to initiate discussion.
4) The thread will start with a copy and paste of these 4 rules.'



I honestly don't know why this video didn't get more reception than it originally did. It's probably one of my absolutely favorite romance AMVs. It also used country music unironically [and in a good way].

The music and the video worked so well together in terms of sync! Literally, the characters seemed to match up fairly well and told a nice story through the song. Beat-wise, I thought some of the crossfades and scene choices did a great job of keeping pace with the music AND the singer's voice. It also matched up nicely with the southern TWANGS. One of the best things I really love about this editor is her great scene selection and making a great effort to create a great mood of the video, and sticking with it consistently. I don't even LIKE Air, and this is probably one of two Air AMVs I constantly keep on loop.

That being said, the video also had several flaws. Technically speaking, it had the black bars on both sides and was given a strange size compared to the typical Air video you'd see by today's standards. Visually speaking, it's more than acceptable, but doesn't have that CLEAR quality that I've seen in some Air videos. That being said, it's still above average. I also think the cross-fades were over-abundant [now that I look at it more strictly, I originally beta'd this video and thought they were cute]. Some of the scene changes were also fairly drastic in terms of setting and facial stations. The video also had 2 instances of starting at point A in an anime scene, skipping point B and moving to Point C with a crossfade. It looked somewhat un-natural and took away from the scene in general.

Overall, I really dug it. It had some issues and needed a little fine tuning here and there, but on the overall, it was a fantastic experience for me, and a great tribute to southern music [that doesn't suck].

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Fall_Child42
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Re: Review - Dear Diary - Amo-Chan

Post by Fall_Child42 » Tue Nov 16, 2010 12:01 pm

CodeZTM wrote: Overall, I really dug it. It had some issues and needed a little fine tuning here and there, but on the overall, it was a fantastic experience for me, and a great tribute to southern music [that doesn't suck].
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source= ... 36&t=h&z=5

"southern"

:P

i kid, i kid.
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Re: Review - Dear Diary - Amo-Chan

Post by godix » Tue Nov 16, 2010 1:50 pm

I'll refrain from ranting about the AR...

I didn't particularly like this one. Part of it is just I don't like country music, I don't like romance videos, so of course I wouldn't like a romance video to country music.

There are tech issues (is the anime really that washed out and fuzzy?), but I've always maintained tech isn't really the most important thing in a video anyway. I felt the editing was too fast. There are very few spots where I can actually take in a clip, few of them up long enough for me to really process what's shown. If the clips were related, like sequentially from the same scene, then that would be ok since they would work together to give an overall impression. In too many spots they aren't connected though, so it just ends up random montage.

Also, the motion and orientation of clips were conflicting. To illustrate what I mean, let me describe the scenes at a certain point. I picked a point entirely at random, because the entire damned video does this so any random spot in it will show what I mean: Starting at 1:06 we have a girl twirling around, a guy facing the camera, angled ground shot of guy laying down, above shot of guy with circling camera, guy looking offscreen left, guy looking offscreen down, girl running to guy who's facing the background. All of this in only 5 seconds.

Objectively speaking, it was ok. But with my lack of interest in the music and genre, combined with seemingly random scenes and the very quick changing of spatial orientation in the clips, this ended up as the type of video I'll forget I even saw within a week.
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Re: Review - Dear Diary - Amo-Chan

Post by Panky » Tue Nov 16, 2010 11:01 pm

While I didn't really dig this amv, I have to agree with you on the sync of the video: it has mantained a real good flow through all of it with mostly crossfades and a few hard cuts, and it didn't feel forced at any moment. But there's again the fact that they look like disconnected scenes, with no more meaning than "jumping around the place". Honestly though, I think it's really hard to attempt to sync that way to such kind of music and try to take explain the story of Air in 3 minutes(when it's probably pretty hard enough to understand by even watching it).

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Re: Review - Dear Diary - Amo-Chan

Post by CrackTheSky » Thu Nov 18, 2010 5:28 pm

I didn't like this. I'm extremely picky with romance videos, and this video highlights why: they're boring. The exceptions tend to be the ones where I have some sort of prior emotional investment in the characters, or the editor does a REALLY GOOD job of telling a new story, and this video falls into neither category. Although the storytelling isn't really bad, as godix pointed out, the editing was so rapid-fire that it was difficult to follow, even though the song was pretty straightforward.

Even ignoring that, most of the scene selection consisted of emotional-angle shots and close-ups. Those are fine for heightening drama, but when that's about 80-90% of what the video consists of, it's hard for the video to impact me in any way. There was no conflict, nothing to keep me interested. It was a sweet little love story, sure, but that alone is not enough to make this a worthwhile video for me.

Sorry man, didn't dig it. I will also admit that I hate country music, but I tried to keep that prejudice separate while I was watching.

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