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Information

• Members: AnnaMayBelle, MaBelle
• Studio: AnimeBelle.com
• Title: Everchanging World
• Premiered: 2005-03-19
• Categories:
  • Drama
  • Serious
• Song:
  • Paul McCartney & Wings Live and Let Die
• Anime:
  • Fullmetal Alchemist (TV)
• Comments: ((This is the second collaboration between Ma Belle and Anna May Belle. "I" reffers to Anna May, the one writing this commentary))
  
  A lot of people complained about Paul McCartney's performance at the Super Bowl this year, but that was what set the thought process behind this video into motion. When he performed "Live and Let Die", Ma Belle got the idea that it would work with Full Metal Alchemist, which luckily, was just being released. We quickly ran out to Target and picked up the first DVD... Which meant we only had the first four episodes. Surprisingly, that turned out to be a good thing. It forced us to be much more creative and artistic than we might've been if we'd had access to more scenes.
  
  We used Adobe Premiere 6.5 to construct the video. As soon as I started work on synching footage to the beat, we hit our first problem. This was the second time it'd happened to me, the first time it made me stop working on a video entirely. I'd set a piece of footage on the timeline, perfectly synched to the beat, but when I rendered it, it'd be off by several seconds. Sometimes it would even lose the synching if I just re-previewed it! This time, PumpkinChick on the Orange Anime forums (pumpkinchick28 on the AnimeMusicVideos.org forums) gave me the advice to convert my audio (an MP3) to a Wav using Audacity, and that straightened it right out.
  
  This was the most 'beat-synching' we'd ever worked on with an AMV. It took a lot of time, and a LOT of timeline markers, but it was worth it in the end. It also took my dad's "musician's ear" to help us time things properly.
  
  While we'd collaborated on a video before (our Shaft video, using Evangelion), this was the closest we'd ever worked on a video. Throughout the entire process, we knew we had something that was... Well, is it tooting our own horn too much to say we felt it was going to turn out great? When we finally finished it, we saved our work and hit that golden "Render" button.
  
  Wouldn't you know that Premiere would crash?
  
  So we rendered again. Crash. Render, crash. Wash, rinse, repeat. It drove us up the wall for about five hours... I simply kept saying "It's Premiere, it does this all the time"... Ma Belle was ready to chuck my computer out a window. We finally brought our problem to the org's forums, where Zarxrax was kind enough to suggest that we render it uncompressed. 5gig (and one 'low hard drive space') warning later, we finally had our video!
  
  We then made an MPEG2 of it so we could watch our finished product without giving my poor computer a heart-attack. That in itself involved a whole giant mess that we won't go into. When we finally got to watch the finished product, Ma asked... "Why is there so much interlacing? We can't have that in a contest!"
  
  So, we'd also like to thank Ian Roberts (Absolute Destiny) for assuring us that those ugly lines wouldn't be on the big screen. And he was right... We showed our video first at Anime Express VIII, where it was warmly recieved by the crowd. And in turn, we recieved the Best Drama award! This wouldn't have been possible without the generous assistance of Pumpkin Chick, Zarxrax, and Absolute Destiny. It's wonderful how AMV creators will reach out and help each other.