Video Information

Information

  • Member: Kai Stromler
  • Studio: Shin Hatsubai/Kuroi Kenshi
  • Title: Auferstehen des Büroarbeits
  • Premiered: 2013-12-20
  • Categories:
  • Song:
    • Equilibrium Prolog auf Erden
  • Anime:
  • Comments: After a long layoff, I picked this up as a decently challenging but constrained project to try to get back into AMVs with -- I have some stuff to say after Causality after all -- and eventually got it finished as SH121. The idea was pretty simple: cut only the office scenes from the TV run of Patlabor, then use the music to make it interesting.

    The idea of this sort of workpiece came half from the music (as even a cursory listen shows, Equilibrium makes anything they touch into a world-crossing epic, even this intro to their Sagas disc), and half from some ideas I'd been mulling over about what AMV editing actually is since about Causality/mid-2010. A hodge-podge of office cuts spread over 30-plus episodes (the last DVD has an unreadbly bad print, and I'm somehow missing volume 8 of the series) gets this very close to found footage, which is the great hurdle with doing anything original in AMVs: anything cut out of directed footage is going to, most of the time, have a story established just by narrative closure. There's still direction here, but less of it than if I'd had a smaller source pool, or used any of the giant robot cuts.

    To the extent that this is obvious, this is an episches video in the Brechtian sense: not really "epic" in the sense that it's come to mean in popular culture, but deliberately cutting against expectations (sweeping music will have interesting video, Patlabor videos will show labors sometime) in order to make the audience think. And if it's actually "epic" in the modern pop-culture sense, then I did my job better than I think I did -- and may have more to learn about what this craft actually is, underneath the underneath.

    Shin Hats self grade: B-. It does ok, but this is a weird concept and the execution is probably more rusty than I, out of practice, think looking at it, given that it's 2013 and everything needs 17 layers of masking.
    stats: # clips: 123. average length: 1.78 seconds. total time: 25.5 hours.


    About the music: Equilibrium is a German pagany-folky-epic metal band, of a kind that appears very seldom elsewhere in the world. They're also wicked fucking awesome. This is the first track from their magnificent Sagas album, which gets better from this very good start. Seeing them in a shed off the main stage area at Wacken, along with well over 2000 other metalheads, was an amazing experience and the one time in my life I've been actually concerned about crowd crush. The music under the trailer card is sampled from the start of "Earth's Old Timid Grace", the first song on Falls of Rauros' The Light That Dwells In Rotten Wood. Falls are an American third-wave black metal band who deserve more attention; I was considering using some Panopticon here, but ...Rotten Wood is a much better record than Kentucky.

    The title card is in German, of course (albeit deliberately clunky German, no actual editor in the deutschsprachigen Raum would ever use "Zeichentrickfilmauseinandersetzung" to mean "AMV"), and translated at the bottom of the manifesto over here.

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