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Information

• Member: Brad
• Title: Why...? Can't...? I...?
• Premiered: 2004-05-14
• Categories:
  • Action
  • Comedy
  • Other
  • Parody
  • Fun
• Songs:
  • Israel Kamakawiwoole Somewhere Over The Rainbow
  • Judy Garland Over the Rainbow
  • Me First and the Gimme Gimmes Somewhere Over The Rainbow
  • Ray Charles Somewhere Over The Rainbow
• Anime:
  • Final Fantasy 8 (VIII)
• Participation:
  • animecentral AMV Contest, animecentral AMV Contest (2004-05-14)
  • Ohayocon 2005 AMV Contest, Ohayocon 2005 AMV Contest (2005-01-14)
• Comments: A new video from AtomX?!... And it's ANOTHER FINAL FANTASY VIDEO?!?! WTF!!
  
  
  OK. I shall explain.
  
  Backstory
  Back in the day (about 5-6 months before the Org opened up), I made my first AMV using Final Fantasy 8 (Gravity of Love). It was extremely well received from the people that saw it, and this sprung me on to make more Final Fantasy videos, disregarding the fact that the concept may end up getting quite stale and overdone. Well.. unfortunately, it did. After 5 FF videos (although 2 of which I still really like and am proud of), I promised myself that I would never make an AMV to FF ever again. This was back near the end of 2001. So for the past two and a half years, I haven't made a single full-scale original AMV (not including the remaster of Gravity of Love, or a couple short tracks in two multi-editor projects). However, this was mainly due to the fact that my computer is seriously SERIOUSLY lacking when it comes to its abilities to do AMVs. Suffice to say, it would be simply not possible for me to do a video to anything but games, short movies, or 1-2 episodes of a series. Despite my lack of videos, I have still remained quite in tune with the AMV community. I still post regularly on the forums and have made many friends in the community, and I consider it to be a big part of my life. I even started up the Online AMV Iron Chef Tournament as a way to kind of re-join the community in a way. And it is the subject of Iron Chef that brings us to the originations of this video.
  
  Origination
  It was around 4 or 5pm on April 14th. I had just gotten home from work and I was pretty bored. So randomly I messaged SnhKnives and it kind of went like this:
  
  Me: Hey.. let's Iron Chef.
  Snh: .. tonight?
  Me: Yeah.
  Snh: .. alright.
  Me: Score.
  
  I knew I didnt have the resources or time to rip a whole DVD and prep it for editing. So I looked over at my CD collection and saw that I had all of the FF8 FMVs ripped on CD in Huffyuv. So I decided to just use that as my IC source. Snh went with a volume of Last Exile. We rounded up some judges, including dwchang. We assigned him the job of finding us a song. The one that we ended up using was Me First & the Gimme Gimmes cover of 'Somewhere Over The Rainbow.' At first I figured Snh had this one in the bag. I mean come on.. Somewhere over the rainbow? Last Exile? Sky? Flying? Over? But, I went with it, and the editing began.
  
  Two hours later, the impromptu iron chef match was over. I ended up getting to around 1:05 (of a 1:31 song). And I was really surprised by how well it turned out! So, we saved, exported, encoded, and uploaded to the judges. In the end, my video ended up winning 4-1. Daniel seemed to be the most impressed by it though. I showed it to a bunch of other people as well, and everyone seemed to really enjoy it. But, I didn't really have any intentions of finishing it.. Until one day.
  
  Ideagasm!
  For the few months before ACen, I had been planning on making an entry for the contest. I was going to be hanging out with a bunch of my AMV friends, and I didn't want to have nothing to show for myself. I had planned on doing one of like 3 or 4 ideas. I was going to hijack my brother's computer to make it, but I simply never really had any time to do anything big, so when it got to around a week before the deadline, I decided to just suck it up and plan on not having anything. It sort of bummed me out, but I knew Koop wasn't going to have anything, so I figured me and him would have a kind of solidarity in that respect.
  
  I was standing in the back at work on April 30th and suddenly, the idea of finishing and extending my Iron Chef video to make it my ACen submission hit me like a ton of bricks. I could literally see the entire video right then and there. I still had 2 hours left of work, but I wanted to leave right then and there so I could get home and get to work on it right away. The deadline was at Midnight, I didn't get home at 5, which gave me about 6 hours to edit... Ayyye aye aye..
  
  I rush home, and the first thing that I do is finish the original video. That only took about an hour and a half or so, including some Flash and Photoshop work. When that was done, I had 3 original drawings to do. I put hardly any time into these (and it shows, hehe). Scanned them, imported them, and started work on the intro section. That alone took around 3 hours or so, due to having to do different revisions and tests to get it right. But, I was able to complete the timeline by around 11:15pm. This kind of made me panic'y since I knew the Huffyuv export and the MPEG-2 encode were going to take at least 3-4 hours (again, my computer sucks hardcore). So I got on ICQ and got ahold of SailorDeath and let him know that the video was done, but I couldnt have it uploaded before Midnight. He let me know that all I had to do was have the entry entered into the OtakuVideo Contest site by Midnight, and everything would be fine, and I could get it uploaded as soon as it was done. The first Huffyuv export ended up taking over 2 hours, and at about 90%, my HD was full and Premiere crashed, so I had to do it all over again. Everything was finally done and ready to upload by like 4am. It was a really long and stressful night. But, my first video in over two and a half years was complete. I didn't think it was all too great, but I was still happy none-the-less :)
  
  The Video
  The actual video portion of this AMV is in most respects, an action video. However, all the stuff that I ended up adding to it was all intended to be funny. So, I figured I should label it as a comedy video since it would seem a bit out of place in the action category. It worked out pretty well, as you'll see in the award section ^_^ One thing to note is that, I know some people will make comparisons to Failed Experiments in Video Editing, but do know that I wasn't trying to copy her concept. My drawings were really only there to be a funny intro, and not something that would make up the entire concept.
  
  And for those interested to see how much I did in those first 2 hours, in this video is right around 01:52.
  
  I really hope you all enjoy this video :) It was really fun to make, and it has seriously gotten me back into the editing mode. So be expecting some new videos from me in the near future. And I swear, they WON'T be Final Fantasy videos.
  
  ----------------------------------------------------------
  Computer Specs
  Pentium II 333mhz
  128mb RAM
  20gb Hard Drive
  
  Video Specs
  512 x 352 Resolution
  30 fps
  1950 kbps Bitrate
  
  Total Editing Time: 8 hours
  ----------------------------------------------------------
  Awards
  - Anime Central 2004
  - Winner: Best Comedy
  - Honorable Mention: Best Original Concept
  - Ohayocon 2005
  - Winner: Best Staff Video (was on Guest Relations)