Video Information

Information

  • Member: Kosmit
  • Title: The Darkest of Places
  • Premiered: 2010-07-05
  • Categories:
  • Songs:
    • Immortals Techno Syndrome
    • The Wet Spots Do You Take It?
  • Anime:
  • Participation:
  • Comments:

    Con participation & awards:
    Japan Expo 2010 - 3rd place overall, 2nd in exclusive entries
    Otakon 2010 - Vic's Pick (outside of the main contest - it was disqualified from the main contest for being 'too hot for Otakon'. Personally I find this hilarious :D )
    Katsucon NSFW contest - winner

    WARNING! You should probably read this AFTER watching the video.

    Some time ago I found the music video for „Do you take it?” by the Wet Spots. I thought the song was hilarious so I send the link to it to several people, including Crossfade. He suggested I make an AMV with it. At first I didn’t even consider it a possibility, but then one of the new episodes of Bakemonogatari got released. That made me remember something. I quickly started randomly going through previous Bakemono episodes only to realize just what an ass lover Araragi really is. I mean seriously, each and every episode there’s at least one shot of a girl’s buttocks and Arararagi (sorry, my tongue slipped) looking at it or at least trying not to look at it. This newly found image of Bakemono’s main character suddenly started to fit the song so well that I decided to make this AMV. That’s how “The Darkest of Places” was brought to life.

    As for the title itself, I wanted to it to be an ambiguous one, that could be both interpreted as a title for a drama AMV or an expression for ass, while not giving away the whole joke. I think it worked out pretty well.

    At the beginning of the creation process I had a general idea of how this AMV should look (of course it got changed 10 times over along the way) and I knew I would like to do some lipsync, since I’m such a lipsync whore. I did not suspect, however, how much editing effort will “The Darkest of Places” require. I thought it would take a week for me to make it, tops. After spending almost every bit of my free time in May and the beginning of June on it, I realized how terribly wrong I was. The biggest issue was, of course, lipsync. I didn’t want to go the easy way and so I wanted to use scenes where the camera, the background or the characters are moving to avoid everything looking static (in some moments it still does though :/ ). That required quite a lot of masking out mouth movement. Scenes with both Araragi and Senjougahara also needed that since very rarely do the speak both at the same time, much less the same exact words... Now I know exactly what haunter103 was going through when creating “Creative Black Space” and, to tell you the truth, I don’t think I’m even close to his level of lipsync mastery.

    Time for some notes regarding the scenes used:

    Human rights abuses
    This is probably the single, most lame pun I have ever made. The scene shows hands. All of them are right hands. And then they are clearly used for abuse. Human rights abuse. Get it? Yeah, I know. I’m ashamed.

    Foreign movies
    I wanted to make this line into a joke by throwing in posters of some other AMVs, preferably trailers. Unfortunately I couldn’t find nearly enough that would even vaguely resemble a real movie poster so I added some Left 4 Dead posters just for the heck of it.
    Posters used:
    Bustin’ by Driftroot
    A Walk to Remember by MeliChan923
    NO EXCUSES! by Douggie and others
    Left 4 Dead 1 Dead Air poster
    Left 4 Dead 2 Dark Carnival poster

    Touch of class
    At first I wanted to show Araragi sit in a class, but that concept got quickly discarded as being painfully obvious and somewhat cheap. So then I got the idea of adding something to the guy’s image that would make him look ‘classy’. His school uniform already looks like a suit so I thought adding a fancy hat would make it look even better. But there was still something missing... and so, the monocle was born. Took me quite a bit of time to make it look exactly like I wanted it, too.

    “Do you take it in the ass” when on the bikes
    That scene with Araragi blinking, that’s actually not Hitagi’s but Suruga’s butt. I had to mask the eye from a different scene altogether because there was no shot of Araragi’s eye blinking with Hitagi’s (or anyone else’s) ass reflected in it.

    “Control the depth and speed”
    A song about anal sex just couldn’t go without a reference to AMV Hell 0’s famous “Gentlemen! Behold! Corn!” sequence. Hence the corn on one of the signs. The FPS joke may be toilet humor, but it just had to be made considering the wide use of the FPS abbreviation in the AMV community. This part is also one of the most time consuming. Just to put it into perspective, the video for this part has 10 layers, 5 cookie cutters, 8 masked elements and various effects to make everything look consistent.

    “If you need more information...”
    I’ve spent way more time on this scene than I probably should’ve or would’ve ever expected. First I had to mask the hand. Then I had to combine the background books into one big image, get rid of the hand and clean the covers from what was previously written on them. The next step was coming up with all the hopefully amusing titles and names (some of them are allegedly real, which means it sucks to be Moe Lester) and combine them for additional comedic effect. In the end, I think it was worth it. For those of you who can’t be bothered with pausing the AMV to read what’s written there, here’s a list of them along with a small explanation where applicable:
    “Size Matters” by Harden Thicke (hard ‘n thick)
    “Do you take it?” by Wet Spots - just the title of the music used
    “Attack of Opportunity” by B.A.Ware (be aware)
    “The Bottom Line” by Dee Flower (deflower)
    READFAGLOLZ by Zarxrax - it has the word FAG in it, that’s why it’s here; plus lots of info contained in that guide came in handy when creating this AMV
    “The Darkest of Places” by Kosmit – simply the title of this here AMV
    “Just Beat It!” by Mike Rotch (my crotch) - a reference to the song by the immortal MJ
    “Forbidden Fruit” by Moe Lester (molester)
    “I Win Fags” by Mod Kip – obviously a reference to this video by a certain extremely helpful Italian fellow
    “Arse Amandi” by Mona Lott (moan a lot) – pun on Ars Amandi, which means “Art of love”
    “Thar she blows! A beginner’s guide to oral sex.” by U.R.Skrood (you are screwed) – I just wanted to make fun of the famous phrase
    “Playing solo” by Cass Trait (castrate)
    “Through the back door” by Ben Dover and Taye Kitt (bend over and take it)
    “Entering the black hole” by A.Ness (anus)

    Get off on vanilla
    The second I started thinking about this part I got the image of Vanilla Ice into my head. Somehow I found it oddly amusing. And to be honest I wouldn’t be able to get off on Vanilla either. Ew.

    Credits
    I have actually done this last year while preparing clips for Why so serious? II. It obviously didn’t make the cut, but I felt it would be a waste to just throw it away. And so I ended up putting it here.

    Software used:
    Sony Vegas Pro 9.0d
    VirtualDub
    Paint .NET
    AMVapp
    AviSynth
    AvsP
    ZarxGUI

    Special thanks go to (in alphabetical order):
    Crossfade
    godix
    mirkosp
    Shizuku

    Announcement thread

Opinions (12)

  • Orig
  • Visual
  • Sound
  • Synch
  • Lip
  • Effects
  • Effort
  • Re-View
  • Overall
  • 9.70
  • 9.70
  • 10.00
  • 9.20
  • 9.40
  • 9.40
  • 9.70
  • 8.60
  • 9.40

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