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Information

• Member: mandisaw
• Title: Hitomi, Take My Hand
• Premiered: 2006-06-05
• Categories:
  • Action
  • Drama
  • Character Profile
• Song:
  • Dido Take My Hand
• Anime:
  • Vision of Escaflowne, The
• Comments: Yes, this another Escaflowne Van & Hitomi romance video. I made this as a sort of remembrance of 10 years of my Esca fandom (ah, has it been that long?!). Van and Hitomi are still one of my favorite anime couples, and the Esca-universe always struck me as particularly rich and entertaining, so hopefully that comes across here. Truly, there's probably more action here than romance, mostly because I'm not a big fan of "dramatic pose" AMVs, since you don't really know what the characters are so deep in thought about. Still, the evolution of the relationship between the two lost & lonely teens is at the core of this video, and I tried to enslave the action to that story (and to the music), rather than vice-versa.
  
  Ambitiously, I wanted to avoid as many Esca-video oft-used scenes and tropes as possible. Once I'd finished rough-editing, I took a look at several of the more popular Esca videos posted here (esp. Cailet730's Ordinary Day fr. 2002 and dwchang's Glory of Love fr. 2003), and Ah, shades!, there are some scenes in common, but I guess there are some that you can't call yourself an Esca-video without *shrug-sigh*.
  
  I tried to avoid the pitfalls of my source song, which has itself been ill-used at times, with regards to its length. The actual main vocals don't start until about 1:00-1:30, and the beginning just wasn't giving me the whiz-bang opening I wanted, so I edited out much of the nice, but slow intro. At the end, the original spends about 45s meandering to a close, and although I wanted a soft, subtle ending, I didn't want to wear out my welcome with a 5-plus minute video. So I did a nice, neat fade out, which worked well with the violins, and actually does pretty much what the song does naturally, only earlier.
  
  On the tech side, I wanted this video to be my first con submission, so I ramped up my source quality and used a shinier MPEG-2 codec for distribution & submission. There's much to be said for checking out your video-in-progress on alternate systems, since I hit a point in fine-editing where I had way too many artifacts and glitches. The "fix" ended up losing my synch, and I had to go back to final rough-edit stage a couple of times. I think the final result is pretty shiny though, so it should be all good.