Cast to Stone wrote:
Hehe, I was wondering if this would be brought up.
The answer is, I couldn't. If you've seen Hellsing, you know there were no scenes of this fight I could use to give a feeling that it was real cameras.. There's one scene when Alucard comes out, but that's it.
Just gathering other static scenes from throughout the anime to give a TV feeling would end up random. So in the end, I went with that..
Fact is, anime is limiting.
I'm not talking about
all the TV effects. Just the one you put the TV screen border on. But even with those complaints you could have put that border on a lot more with the right scene selection. The guidelines for choosing a scene that looked like the were shot by a camera aren't as strict as you'd think. Sure you have to keep in mind that the camera is tangible and doesn't have bullets flying through it but all you really need to pay attention to is if the camera is moving or not. Is it solidly anchored to the ground or is the camera-man running to stay in front of Alucard's guns? Obviously he wouldn't be doing that so any scene in which all the camera does is pivot or stay still is fine.
Here's some examples. I'll describe them as if there was an actual camera. At 0:48 that's good. The camera is stationary and has a good angle on what's going on. It's even zoomed in so you can see all the gory details. That would have been a better time to use the TV thing imho but I did like the target health thing.
But then you went straight into live broadcast and stuff didn't fit. Around 0:58 there were some better scenes you could have put in there. The camera should not be whistling through the air to keep up with Alucard. You should still keep stuff like when the head rolls though. Then it seems like the camera man's dead and dropped the camera (it's okay, another brave soul picked it up and kept filming
). Since you were going for mood I don't think it was 100% necessary to have all the action. The shots in the OVA of the dead policemen dead and ripped to pieces while Alucard was on the phone with Integra would have done just fine there. All in all you should have tried to avoid shots where the background behind the characters was shooting by in a blur.
Outside when he was fighting Dandy was the same. Some good some bad. At 1:15 when Dandy was dodging bullets that was fine. The camera was fixed and doing just what a camera should be doing. But after that you had that same background-rushing cameraman-running problem. You could take those out and replace them with other scenes like the car exploding or that other cameraman getting decapitated. Those had believable cameras. For something like this the actual battle between them isn't completely necessary.
Heck, you were even force-fed some perfectly good camera shots on the spot that you didn't use. Like when the police men were falling out of the sky before they landed on the flag poles. Right from the start in the anime what was meant to look like it was shot from a camera. That's one you should definitely be kicking yourself for not using.
So really for what you were going for it would be entirely possible to find still camera scenes during the points in the anime you were using. You didn't even really have to have Alucard in the shot.
