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Information

• Member: seasons
• Title: Ukemi
• Premiered: 2025-11-29
• Category:
  • Instrumental
• Song:
  • Digitalism Falling
• Anime:
  • Ippon Again! (TV)
• Comments: I made this AMV for the 2025 RICE contest.
  
  I was motivated to make this video because I really loved Mou Ippon!/Ippon Again! and noticed that, at least by late 2023, almost no one had ever edited an AMV with the series. Considering that this anime was only streaming in the US via HIDIVE and was basically invisible to the much larger pool of Crunchyroll/Netflix/Hulu/Prime subscribers, it came and went back in early 2023 with little fanfare in the West. It's possible that, had I never watched this video, I may have never noticed it at all. The manga it's based on has also never received an official Western publication, and even over a year after its completion, I'm not sure if fans online have ever translated more than a third of it into English. I understand the practical reasons that this story wasn't a runaway success outside of Japan, but I still think it deserved better than what it got here. It's one of my favorite sports anime ever made, and it seemed like the perfect source I could use to pursue a goal I've had since I started editing AMVs: making an upbeat action video with a pleasing sense of flow. Maybe I've taken a few stabs at that in the past but I don't think I ever truly succeeded at any of them. Maybe I'd fail at that task once again, but this time that would be okay; a big part of RICE is the opportunity for editors to ask for feedback or critiques from other participants. Maybe I could then transform this "proof of concept" into something that looked or felt like the sort of AMV I've always wanted to make.
  
  Fortunately, I received more feedback on this AMV than on anything else I've ever made. Overall, it was extremely comprehensive and thoughtful, and I appreciate every word of it, even the bits of it that I completely disagreed with because those still represented time that someone took to actively watch and engage with the video I'd made. Unfortunately, the sum total of the critiques I received resulted in what ultimately felt like a tangle of contradictory guidance that I had no idea how to begin to act upon. Reading all 4,500 words of the collected critique, I began to feel as if following everyone's advice would essentially result in creating a brand new AMV that probably wouldn't bare much resemblance at all to the one I'd made. Maybe that wouldn't have been the end of the world and is exactly what I should have done? But as much as I recognized shortcomings and flaws in my AMV, by the time I received feedback on it I was essentially married to it and almost all of the creative decisions that had gone into making it. Had I only wasted everyone's time in specifically asking for feedback that I now felt stubbornly resistant to acting on? I wouldn't say that I agonized over this, but I didn't feel good about it, either.
  
  If you left a critique on this AMV in the 2025 RICE contest, I want to thank you for the time you spent in doing that, and I also want to apologize for not acting upon your advice in the manner that I had surely pledged to do. Please don't let this discourage you from writing thoughtful critiques on other editors' works in the future. It's possible that I might ask someone for critique in the future, but I doubt that I'll ever ask for any kind of collective criticism like this again. Maybe I'm just really bad at accepting it? I guess this was a learning experience, in that regard.
  
  I'm probably making it sound like this is the exact same AMV that I submitted to RICE and I didn't make any changes to it at all, but that's not true! I was very unsatisfied with the original ending and what you're seeing in this version is a very different conclusion, although many of the same shots are still used. I also changed one sequence that shows up somewhere around the 3:40 mark. I have no idea if it was the "right" decision to make or not, but I'm much more happy with it.
  
  A few other notes:
  
  -Five months after the 2025 RICE deadline, John released
  "Left Behind", a Mou Ippon! AMV that flows exponentially smoother than this one and taps out a whole two minutes before mine is close to being finished. It's not an AMV that I would ever make, or even one that I wish I had made myself, but it's a better video than the one I'm writing about here in pretty much every respect. Maybe you haven't seen it because the editor keeps a low profile and/or has an unsearchable name, but you should.
  
  -The track I use in this video, "Falling" by Digitalism, catches the group in a pivotal moment between their transformation from Bush-era blog house to Trump-era generic EDM. It's a track I've loved for a long time and settled on pretty quickly once I decided what anime I wanted to edit with. I understand that a four-and-a-half-minute AMV is definitely on the long side when it comes to what most viewers will willingly sit through, especially when the song has no lyrics whatsoever, but it is what it is. I tried to find a way to shorten this track. Really, I did! Maybe someone with better audio editing chops than myself could have pulled it off, but don't assume that I didn't attempt to find a way to cut the runtime of this video down. Even the ending sequence resisted all of my attempts to cut or mix it down into a shorter form. There's no version of this track that I could have cut down and not left it feeling unnaturally tampered with. Oh, it absolutely would have been noticeable, trust me.
  
  -"Ukemi" is the term used for a set of techniques used in judo for practitioners to soften their fall onto the mat from a throw or tumble. It involves, for example, rolling onto one's back while slapping the mat with both arms in sync. I KNOW THIS because I took an introductory judo class when I was eleven. This was at the urging of my next door neighbor's father, who wanted a regular sparring partner for his son (who he was already training in wrestling for several hours each day). In this class, I was paired up with an older boy who may have been fifteen or sixteen, who was assigned to show me the "breakfall" technique. I remember attempting it twice within the span of a minute or so, before the boy suddenly grew frantically exasperated by my inability to master it instantly, complaining to his sensei that he "can't teach this kid to fall." I was then pulled to the side and watched the rest of the class from against the wall. To be fair, I didn't truly want to be there in the first place, but occasionally I'll recall this moment and wonder why I was tossed out of the class for no reason at all. That wasn't my fault at all and nobody gets this (extremely important) technique right on the first try! Also, "Ukemi" wasn't chosen as a title because it's essentially the same word as "Falling." I know that seems like something I'd definitely do, but I didn't and you have to trust me on that.