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Information

• Member: zeugma440
• Title: 'Communicate'
• Premiered: 2005-12-07
• Categories:
  • Other
  • Fun
• Song:
  • BT Communicate
• Anime:
  • Elfen Lied
  • Elfen Lied (OAV)
• Comments: I - GENESIS
  
  So how did this start ? I had been wanting to edit something based on electronic music for a while, but I first wanted to master my editing tool.
  The completion of "Of Human Ambition..." as well as my own experiments on still images editing helped me deciding that the time had come.
  The choice of the media was more a coincidence : I finished watching Elfen Lied about the same time as I discovered BT and his unique music style. In the beginning, it was only a fantasy in my mind, but as weeks passed, the idea of making these pink-haired catgirls sing "Communicate" was becoming more and more appealing ^^
  Then I decided to give it a try... and the other Elfen Lied videos gave me the very idea that I was looking for : making it a clean and happy AMV, making it bloodless ! That was enough to get me really started !
  
  
  II - GETTING TO WORK
  
  The intial phase of choosing excerpts and editing the song was quick and painless, because I knew that the FX's part would take a hell lot of time... and it did ! Once again, I took my favourite vids and watched them with the editor's eye, taking a few notes and trying to fathom why they looked so cool. I eventually came up with several "best-pratices" of electronic music-based AMV making, plus a few ideas that I had to try on my new production.
  
  The editing -made possible thanks to Vegas Video 4.0 and The Gimp- was quite different from what I had done so far. It was like a little game aimed at illustrating the clicks and the weird sounds coming from the audio track with images and special effects, and without overfeeding the spectator with fancy and pointless effects.
  
  The whole editing lasted seven months, but I'd have a hard time guessing how long I've been really working on it. A rough and fair average would be 15 minutes for every 5 seconds, that is ~75 hours of work. I actually learnt a lot of things, including :
  
  - how to bring life to still images (used a lot in the anime industry)
  - the basics of lip-synch (there's still stuff to improve but I'm quite satisifed)
  - how to properly use masking (ahh, those countless hours I spent creating frame-by-frame masks...)
  - how to make something cool out of basic FX's (aka "common sense" applied to video editing)
  - how to work fast and efficiently with my favourite editing software
  
  
  III - MISC. INFORMATION
  
  * This video is probably one of the very few Elfen Lied AMVs that do not show any drop of blood
  
  * My favourite part of the vid is the "dancing professor" that you can see around the 3:03 mark =D
  
  * This is the first video I made that required three passes during the final encoding. The radial blur effect was just looking too ugly with my usual encoding parameters
  
  * This work is dedicated to a very special someone who caused tremendous changes inside me without even knowing it. The editing of that video started before our unexpected meeting, and ended after that long period during which my brain and my ego had been a real shambles.
  
  * Thanks to Faith for his detailed review of my first version
  
  
  ~Z440