Anime As We Know It (Fantasia Alla Marcia)

[pan_dbgt01]

I really liked it

My own son dislikes my videos

[Shinzui IT]

Not bad, seemed almost as if I were watching a Disney film lol. Nice job!

[Sephirothskr]

Thank you so much so glad you liked it!

[CrackTheSky]

Very mixed feelings on this, though I liked it more than I didn't.

+Great sense of scale -- it's pretty rare to see a video this long these days, and using classical music too. Pretty gutsy all-around to see a video like that through to the end without cutting the song or anything. I really appreciate the heart that went into it.
+There were some truly impressive moments where the scene selection was spot-on.
+There were sustained periods of everything going right -- scene selection, editing, internal sync...when these moments happened the video really hummed along nicely.
+Not sure if this is exactly what you were going for, but the video felt like a kind of summary or showcase of many recent anime series and movies, from the last seven years or so. There were some that were older than that, but most fell in that time frame, I think, and the video reminded me (in some ways) of something like Sammy's The History of Anime or Kusoyaro's DukAnime Retrospective, but for the HD age. Pretty cool.

-There were some pretty obvious quality dips...for the most part the video was gorgeous, but it was really obvious when you weren't using a fully HD source. Some of those anime could have been left out altogether and the video wouldn't have suffered any.
-Too many crossfades. I mean, the whole fricking video was just quick crossfades. That's a pet peeve of mine so I noticed it more than probably anyone else would, but the video really could have used some hard cuts or even longer crossfades.
-There were a few pretty awkward or jarring transitions between scenes. For the most part you did a good job of sustaining internal motion and choosing scenes that flowed well, but every so often there would be a jump from one scene to another and something about the two (color differences, direction of internal motion, emotion) would be so different that the transition itself just tore me out of the video. It seemed like this happened whenever the video would start rolling. I hope that makes sense...
-The video really could have used some more focus and organization. I would have loved to see some sort of logical progress to the scene selection, taking me through older anime to newer anime, for example, or matching up similar scenes and telling some sort of overarching story that way. There was some of this (i.e. all the opening scenes were shots of pretty scenery, etc.), but it wasn't kept up through the whole video and there was no real direction by the end. It ended up feeling mostly like a bunch of pretty scenes stuck together one after the other, occasionally grouped similarly, but with no overriding concept.

Still, even though it had its flaws it was better than I was expecting, and it held my attention so props for that. I just really like to see this kind of ambition, and I did enjoy it and will be keeping it and rewatching it when that certain mood strikes me. You're getting better, looking forward to where you'll go next!

[Sephirothskr]

Thanks. That means a lot to me. I've been getting so discouraged with my work lately, that cheered me up a bit ^^

[Ardamaeus]

Very majestic feeling ;D! Good job x3!

[Sephirothskr]

Very majestic feeling ;D! Good job x3!

Thank you so much! Arigato :3

[seasons]

I definitely wasn't bored by this. It was really pretty. I usually hate these kind of AMVs (would rather not go into the specifics of what I mean by that, although I suspect I'll end up doing so anyway) but I liked this one.

Technically this was great, I thought most of the scenes flowed together really well, and even the cuts between clips were done well. And that's probably really hard to do with a piece of music like this that doesn't have the traditional beats that guide so much of our editing.

It's hard for me to say exactly what it was that I wanted out of this video. I didn't really feel any sense of magic or wonder like I think I was supposed to, but that's probably assigning it a specific purpose that it has no obligation to fill. It certainly didn't feel "random" to me, I was really aware of the structure of it and why you made the choices you did (most of the time, anyway). Maybe that actually worked against it? I really don't know.

I think it just comes down to how I watch AMVs and what it is that I really like about my favorite ones, which tend to take me into a zone that flushes out what I love best about the series/film or the music being used. This kind of epic collage approach doesn't really take me there, maybe because it destroys the illusion that everything you're watching is happening in the same universe, or something like that (for example, even though there's so much buzz about qyll's "Animegraphy" AMVs, I still haven't watched any because the concept just turns me off completely). That said, this is a lot better than other AMVs I've seen made in the a similar vein (lots of which I've come across on Youtube but rarely over here) and certainly much more ambitious and well-made.

Special props for working in Z-Kai: Cross Road.

[Sephirothskr]

Thanks! Finding z Kai was extremely difficult. Seeing as how there's no physical copy in existence :p